It didn’t take very long, but Netflix has found its young Colin Kaepernick: According to a press release, Jaden Michael from Wonderstruck and The Get Down will star in Colin In Black & White, the streaming service’s limited series about the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and activist. The project was first announced back in June, with Ava DuVernay—who already won an Emmy for Netflix with 13th—set to direct the first episode. The six-part series is about Kaepernick’s high school years and his life as a Black teenager growing up with a white adopted family, and it will offer what a press release describes as “meaningful insight into the acts and experiences that led him to become the activist he is today.”
In other words, then, it’s about a young kid who dreams of being an NFL quarterback but experiences things that will convince him to someday stand up for what he believes in (so to speak) even at the expense of the goal he spent his whole life working toward—not that it’s his fault the NFL wouldn’t touch him after his completely reasonable peaceful protests. It’ll be interesting to see how/if the show addresses this, since you can’t really tell Colin Kaepernick’s story without talking about what happened to him in the NFL. Or maybe that’s reductive? Maybe his adolescence is totally worth making a TV show about? We’ll have to wait and see.
You can see a photo of Jaden Michael alongside young Kaepernick below.