EXCLUSIVE: Jordane Christie (Why Women Kill) has signed on for a recurring role in Apple TV+’s limited series The Big Cigar. He joins an ensemble led by André Holland, which also includes Alessandro Nivola, Tiffany Boone, PJ Byrne, Marc Menchaca and Moses Ingram, as previously announced.
The six-episode series based on the eponymous Playboy magazine article by Joshuah Bearman (Argo) tells the extraordinary, hilarious, almost-too-good-to-be-true story of how Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton (Holland) relied on his best friend, Bert Schneider (Nivola)—the Hollywood producer behind Easy Rider—to elude a nationwide manhunt and escape to Cuba while being pursued into exile by the FBI.
Christie will play Newton’s friend and Black Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale, who bonded with Newton over repeated incarcerations and infiltration by the FBI before deciding to leave the Party.
The Big Cigar‘s showrunner is NAACP Image Award winner Janine Sherman Barrois (Claws, The Kings of Napa). Jim Hecht (Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) penned the show’s first episode, with Don Cheadle directing and exec producing the first two. The show hails from Warner Bros. Television, where Barrois and her Folding Chair Productions are under an overall deal. Barrois and Hecht are exec producing alongside Bearman, Joshua Davis and Arthur Spector (Little America) through their production company Epic, a division of Vox Media Studios.
Christie has previously been seen on the Paramount+ dark comedy series Why Women Kill, along with such shows as The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix), Atlanta (FX), S.W.A.T. (CBS), Underground (WGN), Chicago P.D. (NBC) and Containment (The CW). He is repped by APA and Authentic Talent and Literary Management.
