The Barack Obama biopic "Barry" was teased in a Netflix trailer this week, showing the young future president as he tried to navigate his junior year in college at New York's Columbia University.
The movie, which will debut on Netflix on Dec. 16, stars Devon Terrell as Obama as he makes his way through Harlem and struggles to maintain relationships with his Kansas-born mother and Kenyan father, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
"I was originally doing a series on HBO with Steve McQueen ['Codes of Conduct'], which eventually got cut off after the pilot," Terrell told GQ magazine about eventually getting the part to play Obama.
"And the day that happened, my agent called me and said, 'Look, there's interest from this film called 'Barry,' and I was like, 'Oh, what's it about?' and he said, 'It's about Barack Obama.'"
My heart kind of stopped a little bit, because it had been a dream of mine. When I was 19, my cousin asked me, 'What's your dream role?' and I said, 'Barack Obama.'"
The movie is the second biopic involving Obama. "Southside With You," which highlighted Obama's first date with then Michelle Robinson in 1989 Chicago, debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, said Vanity Fair.
Parker Sawyers played Obama while Tika Sumpter portrayed the future Michelle Obama. The movie was directed by Richard Tanne.
"I pretty much just culled from the public-domain articles, interviews, videos. ... just whatever I could get my hands on," Tanne told Vanity Fair. "And through the years I have been reading as many books as possible. Of course there wasn't a note taker on the dates, so you just have to extrapolate from what's there."
"The trajectory of the date is about 90 percent accurate. They went to the art institute. They had lunch afterwards. They saw 'Do the Right Thing.' They had ice cream. They kissed outside the ice cream parlor, at Baskin-Robbins. …There was some question as to whether or not the community organizing meeting happened on the first date, or if it just happened early in the courtship but dramatically it worked, so I just put it in. Again, it's a fictionalized account, so I tried to be as authentic as possible."
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