According to The Hollywood Reporter, actor Elijah Kelley is set to portray Sammy Davis Jr. in a new limited series picked up by Hulu.
What’s Happening:
- The project comes to Hulu from Empire co-creator Lee Daniels, who is under an overall deal with 20th Century Studios.
- This will be an eight-episode limited series exploring the life of the entertainer and told through the lens of his racial identity and relationship with the Black community.
- The untitled series is based on Wil Haygood’s book, In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr., and will chart his rise from childhood stardom on the vaudeville stage where he became one of the most famous Black entertainers of the 1950s and ’60s (and the only Black member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack). At the same time, he spent most of his career surrounded by controversy and ridicule — over his affairs with white film stars, his 1960 marriage to Swedish actress May Britt, his conversion to Judaism, his closeness to the Kennedys (and later Richard Nixon) and his problems with alcohol and drugs.
- Daniels and frequent collaborator Thomas Westfall (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) will write the series. Daniels and Westfall are both set to executive produce, and Daniels will also direct the first two episodes of the drama.
- Kelley will produce alongside the author, Haygood. Marc Toberoff is also set as an executive producer.
- News of the Sammy Davis Jr. project first came out in mid-2019, when Daniels and Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone was poised to executive produce the series based on the same book.
- A filming location and production start date have not yet been determined.
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