At the center of the BET+ drama are best buddies, Junior Massey (Aml Ameen) and Zeke Garrett (Ronnie Rowe Jr.), whose bond is threatened when a tragedy on the job sets them on starkly different paths to better lives. While Junior takes advantage of a broken system to pursue money and power in gambling and bootlegging, Zeke fights the railway to change the system from within by unionizing the Black porters. As it becomes clear that Junior and Zeke’s goals are in direct conflict with each other, their once unbreakable bond is stretched to its limits while Fay and Junior’s wife, Marlene form a sisterly connection. Parade.com recently spoke with Woodard about her role in the groundbreaking series and how her insistence revived settings such as the brothel that looked like a “trap house,” until she asked them to spruce it up. “The numbers were hanging and it needed a paint job. I said, ‘This is a place people come to escape the world, to get out of their life, to breathe, to be accepted, to be understood for a moment, even if they’re paying for it.’ I wanted that house to be that kind of place, an Oasis.” Find out what else Alfre Woodard revealed about The Porter, streaming now on BET+.
What is the premise of The Porter?
We meet Zeke and Junior, our porters, they run the line between Montreal and Chicago, [the] year is 1921. They’ve come back from the first World War, which was particularly brutal. They live in St. Antoine, a community in Montreal, a Black community that is full of people who have come up from the different parts of the Caribbean, and from the States to work in Canada. There are lots of other porters, but we watch them in their fight to unionize and to join the railroad union that is already there. In 1921, we were still defining ourselves as a nation, there was organized and disorganized crime everywhere. And the Garveyites, of course, had come up from the Caribbean and from Harlem as well. And we have the Black Cross nurses, Marlene and Gwen—Marlene is the wife of Junior. We have Loren Lott’s character, Lucy; she is a beautiful bubblin’ brown sugar who is a dancer and a singer. So we got all the girls that are entertainers with their dreams, and there’s the club atmosphere, everything is happening that you might think is happening in that Jazz Age. And our Junior finds a way that he wants to move forward in striving because you know, Black people are strivers, it’s in our cultural DNA. And then Zeke has another way of putting forth his dreams for how we should move forward. Then there’s Fay, who has found a place to have agency in 1921 when women were under the thumb of their daddies, their lovers or their husbands. She has created a house, a house where there’s family, a family of women who call their own shots. We watch those stories play out over eight episodes. And that’s just the first season.
Tell us more about your character, Fay.
She’s got a pretty violent and sad backstory that [co-creators and showrunners] Annmarie Morais (Killjoys) and Marsha Greene (Mary Kills People) and I came up with. Her backstory is very tragic, but I wanted to play her because I thought, an outcome instead of being beaten down by it and just brutalized, her outcome would be a complete turning away—and been there done that. She came from the church, her father was a minister, her husband, who her father thought was so great to be her husband was abusive, and he caused the death in a fire of their children. She had nothing left and nobody ever cries foul on these men at this point. This is 1921, and women are making their way, the only way to make a way as a woman is to join up with more women. That’s still true now, too. The one thing that I think it came to me that she would still have because she loves church life, she believed that the good news, the gospel, is that everything that she was taught about the shame of the body, and what was appropriate, she realized, I’m turning, I’m turning away from all that, that cannot be true because look what it got me. And so, the thing that she did have left in her heart was the belief in the good news, the belief in love, the belief in acceptance. And that’s how she chose to live her life.
Since it’s based on a true story, how much of this real history did you know beforehand, and/or what surprised you about it the most?
I’ve been around a long time and have lived a lot; I travel a lot and listen to older people talk a lot. So, none of it at all was surprising, which was why it was exciting to bring it to the screen. We all have stories from our people, our family members, through the years, and those stories get passed down. We have people of oral tradition, so we know those stories. I knew that people used to keep big ice chunks or blocks. I remember that there were iceboxes literally and I heard that the iceman came along. But we had a refrigerator, that gave us crushed ice. But to have the moment that our story takes off having to do with an ice incident that should not have happened sets in motion and really lets you know, how much disregard was paid to not only our porters and the jobs that they’re doing, but to black people and to people in service in general.
What can you share with us about season two?
I am one of the creative producers. Being an actor, I have been put on absolute lockdown alert and I obey orders. I can’t tell you anything about a sophomore season. I just want you to enjoy this one. Next, catch up on another great BET+ series, First Wives Club!
