EMMY-WINNING actor Jeffrey Wright takes on the leading role in HBO’s ground-breaking prison film O.G.
Filmed over a five-week period at Indiana’s maximum-security Pendleton Correctional Facility, O.G. premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, where Wright won the award for best actor in a US narrative feature film.
The film was not only shot in an active prison, but also featured several of the incarcerated men and prison staff as first-time actors.
O.G. takes an intimate and unflinching look at the journey of one man at the precipice of freedom. The story follows Louis (Wright), once the head of a prominent prison gang, in the final weeks of his 24-year sentence.
His impending release is upended when he takes new arrival Beecher (Theothus Carter) – who is being courted by gang leadership – under his wing.
Coming to grips with the indelibility of his crime and the challenge of reentering society, Louis finds his freedom hanging in the balance as he struggles to save Beecher.
The film is unique for its realistic approach.
Director Madeleine Sackler explained: “There have been so many prison films, that it’s become a genre of its own.
“To me, when a type of story becomes a genre, it can lose its uniqueness or its specificity in the storytelling.
“My goal was to disregard the prison genre and start from scratch, starting with one character, a man preparing to leave after many years behind bars.
“To do that as authentically as possible, to truly understand and portray that experience, I wanted to make the film in close collaboration with people going through the experience themselves, so I started calling different departments of correction around the country.
“And I was very lucky when the State of Indiana called me back.
“This film wouldn’t be what it is if we hadn’t made it as a collaboration with the prison, and with hundreds of men incarcerated there.
“And to have two films come out of the experience, one fiction and one non-fiction, is very exciting. We were able to explore many different themes.”
Wright added: “It was absolutely necessary for me to wrap my head and my body around who this character was, and what the story was that we were trying to tell.
“It’s a pretty informative place. It’s an affecting place. There’s an energy inside that place unlike no other. It’s heavy, it’s kind of laden with trauma.
“It’s just molecularly heavy inside, and it certainly informed our understanding of the story, of the issues, and in my case, the character that I was playing.”
O.G. debuts same time as the US this Sunday at 11am on HBO (Astro channel 411/431 HD) with a primetime encore at 11.30pm.
