John Legend Expands His Underground

Underground executive producer and music supervisor John Legend adds actor to his Underground resume when he’ll guest star as abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the second season of the WGN America drama.

Most will find it quite palatable to envision Legend, himself, an outspoken civil and equal rights advocate, portraying the orator and author who was born into slavery.

In a recently released statement, Legend opened up about what drew him to the Civil War drama saying “I studied African American studies and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery, and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring and when I saw the treatment of it in the script, I thought this was the perfect show for us to do and so we did it.”

The series centers on a group of slaves planning a daring 600-mile escape from a Georgia plantation using the Underground Railroad and stars Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Mykelti Williamson (Forrest Gump)

Season 2 of Underground returns to WGN America in January 2017.