Watch Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson

The last time many of us saw Samuel L Jackson in a TV programme, he was appearing in Staged, the lockdown comedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

Now the Oscar-nominated star of Pulp Fiction is back on the small screen in a very different project.

Enslaved, which he fronts with writer Afua Hirsch and investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici, has been made by the production company run by Jackson and his wife, LaTanya Richardson.

Patrick Holland, controller of BBC Two, says: “I had the privilege to meet with Samuel L Jackson, Afua Hirsch and Simcha Jacobovici at the start of their production last year and I was determined to bring their essential, hugely ambitious and important series to the BBC. These are stories that demand to be told and which sit at the very centre of our shared history.”

Originally shown in the US as a six-part series, it will be broadcast in the UK to tie in with Black History Month as a four-episode programme. Enslaved uses state-of-the-art technology, reportage and dramatic reconstructions to retell the stories of some of the 12 million Africans kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported from their homeland to the Americas by European slave traders.

There’s also a focus on those who died en route due to shipwrecks or the appalling conditions in which they were kept throughout their long and difficult journeys; 3D mapping has even been used to locate and explore sunken slave ships on three continents.

“British viewers will also be fascinated to see Bristol’s role in this history, as writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch visits the now infamous – and since toppled – statue of Edward Colston,” adds Jamie Lynn, an executive who brought the series to the BBC. “With impressive and groundbreaking production values, this is an unmissable look at a near lost history.”

Jackson is a man in demand. A prolific actor, he currently has three films awaiting release, is working on another as well as a TV series, and once those are complete, will begin making two other projects. But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take part in Enslaved, particularly as it had a personal edge to it.

In a recent US interview he told Trevor Noah: “It was a way for me to reconnect to my identity and to tell a story that we never talk about, about the people who didn’t make it and how people still profited from those that didn’t make it.”

Hirsch, meanwhile, spoke to Variety magazine about her experience of making the programme and singled out Jackson for praise, calling him “a total joy, I loved working with him. He just threw himself into this project with so much energy. He was genuinely intellectually curious about the history and also felt this emotional attachment to his own heritage and his own story.

“It was a real privilege to be with him in parts of that journey because he traced his ancestry to Gabon and went specifically to where his ancestors were trafficked into slavery.

“He was very generous with his emotions and his experience, so it was a really special thing.”

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