When Selwyn Seyfu Hinds first picked up the award-winning novel Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, he was on a break during the holidays in his homeland of Guyana. “I have a longstanding rule not to read material over Christmas,” he says. But Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, producer of The Maze Runner films, convinced him to break that rule. He was glad he did.
“The book was just astonishing,” says Hinds. The journey of a young Caribbean boy navigating trauma, identity, and freedom deeply resonated with Hinds’ own experience immigrating to America at 14.
“The emotional arc felt the same,” he says. “Learning new ecosystems, new languages and new people – understanding the opportunities and the dangers in the place that you exist. And all of it on your road to finding your agency, finding your method, finding love, you know, finding your existential self. All of that came together and I said this is something that I have to write.”
Washington Black is now a lush, genre-bending TV series on Hulu, executive produced by Hinds, who also serves as showrunner. It’s a steampunk reimagining of the 19th century from a perspective rarely seen on screen. Set in the early 1800s, it follows George Washington “Wash” Black (Eddie Karanja), a boy born into slavery on a Barbados plantation. After an unfortunate event endangers his life, he flees with British explorer Titch (Tom Ellis), embarking on a globe-spanning journey that takes him into adulthood.
The series weaves back and forth between 20-something Wash (Ernest Kingsley Junior), with flashbacks to Young Wash, delving into matters of race, resilience and a young America. Actor Sterling K. Brown even has a supporting role and serves as Executive Producer. But it’s the unexpected playfulness and optimism that the steampunk tropes – like the depiction of fantastic steam-powered flying machines – that really make it extraordinary.
Tom Ellis and Eddie Karanja in 'Washington Black'
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Though you may not be familiar with Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, it seems he was somehow born to write this show – even if it took a while to find him.
A child of the 1970s and ‘80s, he grew up devouring all types of stories: comic books, Stephen King novels, British classics, and Spielberg movies, all while living in Guyana under British colonial influence. After immigrating to Brooklyn and then Long Island, he began writing poetry and short stories before falling into journalism in college all while nurturing his love for music. His first book, Gunshots in My Cook-up: Bits and Bites from a Hip-Hop Caribbean Life, was published in 2002.
Dreaming that his stories could somehow leap off the page, Hinds got a wild idea. “I wrote a feature adaptation of my own first book, just to see if I could write a movie, and write a script. Lucky enough, I had some really good friends who were either junior agents out here, or were in the business in some form, and I sent them the script. They said, ‘Yeah, that’s a movie – you can write a movie!’ And that just became my quintessential early morning, weekend, and late night job. I would just write scripts while I was sort of moving through my path as a journalist,” he says.
As determined as he was, he says Hollywood still felt like “some fanciful Narnia you couldn’t practically get to,” until a breakfast meeting with filmmaker Reggie Hudlin (Marvel’s Black Panther TV show) changed everything for Hinds.
“Reggie was doing all the things I wanted to do – writing, directing, producing, making comic books. And I realized, oh, this is actually possible.” Hinds moved to Los Angeles, broke into comics through DC’s Vertigo, and eventually into TV, developing a series for HBO based on a property from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. He also wrote an acclaimed episode of The Twilight Zone for Jordan Peele in 2019. But it’s Washington Black that he calls his most personal and bold work yet.
Book to Screen
The spirit of the eight-episode show Washington Black stays true to Edugyan’s novel, but Hinds admits the TV version does take some dramatic license in building out the world.
“I told Esi, think of it like the same house, but with different bedrooms and hallways,” Hinds says. The book’s core themes remain, but the series dives deeper into the imagined universe, adding new locations, characters, and narrative threads, especially for Wash’s love interest, Tanna (Iola Evans). Tanna is a biracial woman from the Solomon Islands with her own struggles around identity and colonialism.
“I wanted to interrogate empire and colonial legacy from another angle,” says Hinds. “Her journey of agency is different than Wash’s, but just as complex.” The steampunk elements are also expanded, most notably in the invention of Wash’s own flying craft, the Wind Sailor.
“If a world has a Cloud Cutter, what else is possible?” Hinds asked himself. Drawing from East African boat design and other global influences, Hinds says the Wind Sailor becomes a metaphor for Wash’s growth: a vessel built from everything he’s learned, and everything he’s inherited.
Advice for Writers
When it comes to crafting intellectually rich, yet emotionally constrained characters, especially those living in the classist, sexist nineteenth century, Hinds’ advice is to start with silence.
“We often had to write the silent movie version of a scene first because so many characters are locked in systems where they can’t say what they feel due to gender, race, or class.” He says that by stripping away dialogue, the writers focused on body language and internal life, only layering in words once the emotional foundation and subtext was clear.
When asked how to make characters’ dialogue sound distinct from each other, Hinds says to look at the character’s emotional depth and not focus on phrasing.
“It’s not about how they sound. It’s about how they think. Who they are. Once you sort that out, the dialogue writes itself.”
Washington Black is now streaming on Hulu.