‘We had a therapist on set’ – William Jackson Harper on The Underground Railroad
When he was a child growing up in
Texas in the 1980s, William Jackson Harper went to a show at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas. “There was some part of the programme where some guy, somewhere in the stands, screams out, ‘The south will rise again!’ Things like that just came up that I didn’t clock as major moments. But as
I got older I was like, ‘Oh, that was messed up.’”
He continues: “There’s a point in a lot of black people’s lives where, especially if you’re around a lot of white people, all of a sudden your race be
comes a thing. For me, it was middle school. It makes everything that’s happening now seem like, ‘Oh well, nothing ever really changed. It just went underground and now it’s back on the surface.’”
In the post-Trump age of resurgent white nationalism, racist police violence and Black Lives Matter, there has been a reckoning about US history, especially in terms of race: what should be brought to light and what should stay buried? Just last week, a Louisiana Republican suggested schools should teach “the good” about slavery. And there has been uproar over the removal of Confederate symbols, with accusations of “erasing history”, even as a Confederate flag and a mock gallows featured in the January storming of the Capitol, in a “south will rise again” spirit.
All of which makes this an interesting moment to launch an epic drama revisiting the darkest days of American slavery. The Underground Railroad is possibly the highest-profile examination of the subject since 12 Years A Slave. The 10-part series is guided by Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight, and adapted from the Pulitzer prizewinning novel by Colson Whitehead. The story follows an enslaved woman named Cora, played by South African actor Thuso Mbedu, who escapes from her Georgia plantation and journeys across the mid-19th-century south.
Despite its ravishing cinematography and prestige production values, the series does not flinch from portraying the cruelty and violence of the time. In the first episode, a black man is viciously flogged then burned alive. Worse things happen later. Cora does find pockets of happiness, which is where Harper’s character comes in, but in terms of America’s ongoing culture war, it seems sure to provoke the “erasing our history” brigade.
“I think it’s just being honest about what the history actually is,” says Harper from his Brooklyn apartment, where he has spent most of the past year locked down with his girlfriend and his dog. “Who do we want to elevate? And who do we want to expose? That’s the thing people are having a hard time with: the heroes we were all raised with, sometimes they were actually … not.”
Railroad sees Harper in a very different mode. Best known for portraying Chidi Anagonye, the quizzical, terminally indecisive philosophy professor from hit sitcom The Good Place, he has carved out a space as the type of intelligent, metropolitan, mild-mannered black man who barely existed in popular culture until recently. He played a similar character, to fish-outof-water effect, in horror shocker Midsommar, and does so again in his recent romcom We Broke Up. He was almost in danger of becoming typecast, although fans’ reaction when Harper took off his shirt in one Good Place episode suggested he always had romantic lead potential.
“I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting this role,” he laughs. Harper had no inside connections. Like everyone else, he sent in an audition tape and hoped. “I started literally right after we wrapped the US shooting of The Good Place. The day we finished, I got on a plane and went to the set for The Underground Railroad.” The transition was something of a lurch: “I think that, because I’ve done a lot of comedy, I have this inner ticking clock. I had to let go of that. It was more about making sure that this world breathes and feels real and visceral.”
The Underground Railroad is not strictly history. Its most fanciful flourish is to imagine an actual railroad, with tracks and steam engines, helping enslaved people escape to the north when in reality it was a network of activists and safe houses. But much of the story is inspired by, or close to, actual events. Harper’s character, Royal, is a sensitive action hero: a freed man who fights to liberate other enslaved people. His home is an almost utopian black-run community vineyard in Indiana.
There was no direct historical precedent for the character, but Harper drew on figures such as John Mercer Langston, whom he also portrayed in the podcast series 1865. Langston is exactly the type of figure American history usually leaves out – an activist, one of the first black members of congress, US minister to Haiti and a founder of Howard University in Washington DC. “It blew my mind that I never knew anything about him,” says Harper. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, people did these things, even at a time when it seems impossible.’”
The Underground Railroad was psychologically challenging, says Harper, given that the cast were effectively re-enacting traumas experienced by their ancestors, only a few generations ago. This can be traumatic in itself. “Barry’s fantastic at creating an environment where you feel safe,” says Harper. “We had a therapist on set. If things got to be too much, we would talk to that person. I never did but Barry definitely did. He did it while taking care of the rest of us.”
This brings us to another tricky issue: alongside calls for a more thorough understanding of US history, there have been debates about the depiction, and potential fetishisation, of slavery as what has been labelled “black trauma”. The Underground Railroad follows in the tracks of not just 12 Years A Slave but a run of recent offerings such as Antebellum, Harriet, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, as well as the Amazon series Them. Many of these were criticised for almost revelling in scenes of cruelty, horror and sexual violence against black people, especially women.
Jenkins has written about his reluctance to add to this, but ultimately he argued: “If not now, when? As a student in this country – educated in the public institutions created by the nation to educate and form its citizens – the imagery I speak of, if presented at all, is abridged, amended, curtailed and coded to protect the legacy that leads to the siren call of ‘Making America great again’.”
Harper also knows these dangers, he says. Travisville, the first play he wrote, dealt with civil rights issues in 1960s Texas. When it was staged offBroadway in 2018, he recalls: “A friend of mine after the show came up, and she said, ‘Great job. I’m really tired of hearing about black trauma, though.’ After thinking about it for a while, I came to understand her point of view.”
He thinks The Underground Railroad is different. “The thing that really excited me about the story, and took it away from just being ‘trauma’, is that, at its heart, it’s more about resistance than enduring. It’s about changing circumstances, not waiting for something to change, so you get to be your fully realised self.”
While it revisits the past, The Underground Railroad clearly has plenty of light to cast on present-day America. Making it during such a time of upheaval, Harper has learned a great deal about himself. Although he has participated in Black Lives Matter protests and contributed to the debate, he says: “I am not the person that wants the bullhorn. I don’t want to be at the front of the crowd, being the leader. The way I get to provoke is by getting to do pieces like this. This is the thing I feel I can get 100% behind. I feel that I’m a part of something, saying something that needs to be said.”
• The Underground Railroad premieres on Amazon Prime Video on 14 May.
It blew my mind that people did these things, even at a time when it would have seemed impossible
when he released a few images to the media. Clearly, it was not just me who found Hockney’s passionate pictures of new life in his cottage and garden in the Norman paysage uplifting. Here was movingly optimistic art, full of the promise of spring, even as Covid plunged the planet into despair.
Now those pictures have been printed up to the scale of oil landscapes and are looking even better. This is Hockney’s best exhibition in a long time, perhaps his most important ever, given the ode to joy it offers an injured world. It is also “a homage”, he says, to the painters who first inspired him. Hockney was born in industrial Bradford in 1937 and grew up in a smoggy postwar Britain. Where did he get a feeling for all the bright strong colours that sweep this exhibition?
“Well, it came from Monet and Matisse and Picasso. Bradford was a very, very black city then. The buildings were totally black from coal. And that’s what I painted: you couldn’t see colour much. But I do remember going to a Van Gogh show in Manchester in 1954. I thought Van Gogh was quite a rich artist, because he could use two whole tubes of blue to paint the sky. I’ve always remembered that exhibition. It was a marvellous thing for me to see.”
That reminds him about Van Gogh’s turbulent personality. “There’s a story – I think this is true – that Van Gogh was always bothering Toulouse-Lautrec to start a commune for artists. Well, Lautrec was an aristocrat painting in Paris and he wasn’t interested in communes at all. He said to Van Gogh: ‘You should go to Arles.’ He wanted to be rid of him.” Hockney is laughing. “I’m sure that’s true, because he’d be annoying him. Well, he did go to Arles and it was good, wasn’t it?”
Hockney’s life can be seen as one long quest for brighter sunshine, stronger colours, sharper light. He always wanted to be an artist: when he got into grammar school in Bradford, he found it was only the bottom class that was allowed to “waste time” on drawing, so he deliberately failed every subject. He left his soot-black birthplace for art college in London, then went on a trip to New York, where he bleached his hair and realised postwar London was drab compared with the US.
By 1964, he was living in Los Angeles. The way he feels about Normandy now is the way he felt about California then. “I remember in Bradford there weren’t many shadows, because the light was just grey light, mostly. I’d noticed the shadows in Hollywood movies and I knew Hollywood was a bright place with sun, so I wanted to go there. Like Van Gogh going to Arles.”
Hockney is a hedonist painter. His pictures are about enjoyment. His pursuit of life, liberty and happiness first expressed itself in unabashed portrayals of gay desire, at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain. But his paintings of his LA friends, such as the writer Christopher Isherwood, of swimming pools and swimmers, of men in showers, are not just records of his life; they are poetic rhapsodies of colour and light. It is through the white spume of a diver’s splash, against dark blue water under a light blue sky, that he expresses longing, love, the moment held. “California has a very clear light. You can see 100 miles sometimes. It’s very, very clear and that’s what I loved about it.”
On 15 November 2018, at Christie’s in New York, one of the greatest of Hockney’s early works – his sensual and mysterious 1972 masterpiece Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – set a world record for a living artist at auction when it fetched $90m (£70m). But Hockney had other things on his mind then. He had found what he calls his “paradise”. Not the glamorous paradise he once saw in Hollywood, but the pastoral paradise of a French garden.
That summer, he drove through Normandy and was struck by the countryside. “It’s very, very beautiful, this part of the world. It’s unbelievably green. Everywhere we look is green.
The horizons are just all trees: the only buildings we can see from the house are my studio or the barn. Otherwise, it’s just trees. We can’t see, quite, the sunset, because there’s some hills in the way. The sunrise I can watch from the kitchen window. Just as it’s coming up, a little gold bar comes over the horizon. It’s quite magic: you can only look at it for about two minutes, three minutes, then it’s too bright. I can see it in the winter from my bedroom, because then it’s moved south. It will move north until 21 June, then it will start its journey south again.”
He thought about finding a place to paint spring in this lush region, discussing the project with his assistant, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. “J-P said: ‘Well, if you rent a house, you might not be able to smoke in it.’ So he rang up some agents. From the moment we entered this place, we both fell in love with it. We were only here about 25 minutes and decided to get it, because it wasn’t that much money. In Sussex, it would have cost a hell of a lot more.”
Hockney seems to think his impulse purchase needs to be justified. His groundedness, like his accent, is one of the ways in which he has never left Yorkshire. But there is nothing modest about the project on which he has embarked. “I’m teaching the French how to paint Normandy. They gave up painting, didn’t they? That’s Derrida, isn’t it? When he said painting was dead, I always thought that was wrong, because I thought: ‘Well, that means the only depiction taken seriously is a photograph.’ Everybody’s a photographer now, aren’t they? Drawing is far more interesting.” He gestures around the gallery. “If these were photographs, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as good, I don’t think. At all!”
The great “tradition” of modern French painting has, he thinks, been allowed to die: there is no equivalent, in the country, of the painters who have kept the flame alive in Germany, Britain and the US. So here is a Yorkshireman, in his cap, to teach France how to see itself afresh – and the lesson seems to be going down well. “Some French company has named a rose after me,” he beams.
The Arrival of Spring was shown in Paris last year and he is preparing for a major show at the Orangerie, one of the French capital’s great museums. There, he will join together his Normandy pictures to create a modern Bayeux tapestry 88 metres long. The show will also put him alongside the most symphonic of all French landscape painters, Monet, as the gallery is home to Monet’s Nymphéas, his expansive, enfolding paintings of the lily pond at his garden in Giverny, Normandy.
“Aww, he’s a great, great, great painter,” says Hockney when I wonder why Monet is often misunderstood as a “chocolate box” artist. “Monet saw 40 springs, 40 summers, 40 autumns and 40 winters in Giverny. They’re fantastic paintings. They’re still very, very fresh, aren’t they? They could have been painted yesterday. It was horticultural, mostly flowers, because he lived in a walled garden.
“Have you been to Giverny? The lake where he had the nymphéas, you had to cross a railway to get to it. He had a little bridge. He would look at it and probably smoke two cigarettes and then walk back to his studio and paint it. The walk was three minutes, really. You can have a very, very strong visual memory for an hour or so after you’ve been looking at something intensely, and that’s what he did. I don’t care if they’re on chocolate boxes!”
Like Monet, Hockney is creating a personal world of natural beauty to paint. His garden covers 1.6 hectares (four acres) and has a stream at the bottom. Walking around the RA exhibition, you feel as if you are there, strolling around, entranced. There are even a couple of lilies in a pond, which Hockney has depicted full of reflections, like Monet’s. What does he think is the appeal? “I think it’s space: the trees exist in space. How do we see space? Sometimes people say, ‘Well, we only see objects, we don’t see space.’ But we feel space, don’t we? I think that’s absolutely true. I feel it here.”
Gonçalves de Lima is shaping his garden just as Monet shaped his: “When I was doing The Arrival of Spring in 2020, J-P was planning for 2021. He was already planning new flowerbeds, placing trees in different places. We’ve got a pine tree now, with cords holding it up. They will stay there for a while, then it won’t blow down. He sees that I draw in layers and he arranges trees, flowers and things accordingly.”
Monet gave the paintings that hang in the Orangerie to the French state after the tragedy of the first world war. A century on, Hockney has shown again that painting nature is a resonant response to a great crisis. But today he is not in the mood to be mawkish about the pandemic. Instead, he jokes that Gonçalves de Lima calls these pictures “the Covid collection” as if they were in a fashion show. And, far from suffering, he insists he had the time of his life in lockdown. At last, it gave him total peace to work. “I had a wonderful time,” he says. “I worked long hours. I’d go to bed at 9 o’clock sometimes – and sometimes it was still light when I went to bed. But I loved getting up early in the morning, like Monet did.”
In California, he adds, there isn’t really a spring because there isn’t really a winter. It was only when he started spending more time in Britain that he noticed the season again. “The first spring I’d seen in 20 years was in 2002,” he says. “I was sitting for Lucian Freud and I walked every morning through Holland Park. I noticed the spring and I thought: ‘Oh, it’s very exciting, this. Very exciting.’”
• David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 is at the Royal Academy, London, 23 May-26 September. Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandyby Martin Gayford and David Hockney is published by Thames & Hudson, £25 hardback.