Thursday, March 28, 2024

Grandmaster Flash to Advise on Netflix’s ‘The Get Down’; Actor Cast to Play Him

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Grandmaster Flash (L) and Mamoudou Athie

*Hip Hop legend Grandmaster Flash has been recruited by director Baz Luhrmann for his Netflix drama series “The Get Down” — and incorporated him into the on-screen story, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The streaming service announced Wednesday that Flash will serve as an associate producer and adviser on the drama series, with young actor Mamoudou Athie portraying Flash on-screen.

As previously reported, “The Get Down” will focus on the birth of hip-hop in the early 1970s. The coming-of-age series, featuring a cast of rising stars, centers on a crop of fictitious characters who along the way will encounter historical figures along the way, including Flash.

“I can’t tell you just how much joy and great spirit we are getting from working with some of the founding fathers of the form,” Luhrmann said. “Not only in music, dance and graffiti but the culture of the time in general. The whole team is absolutely thrilled to have Grandmaster Flash on board.”

Per Netflix:

1970s New York — broken down and beaten up, violent, cash strapped — dying. Consigned to rubble, a rag-tag crew of South Bronx teenagers are nothings and nobodies with no one to shelter them — except each other, armed only with verbal games, improvised dance steps, some magic markers and spray cans. From Bronx tenements, to the SoHo art scene; from CBGBs to Studio 54 and even the glass towers of the just-built World Trade Center, The Get Down is a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco — told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids who changed the city, and the world … forever.

Athie, 27, is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and made his stage debut opposite Diane Lane and Tony Shalhoub in The Mystery of Love and Sex. He has appeared in the CBS drama “Madam Secretary.”

Making his television series debut, Luhrman will helm the first two episodes as well as the series finale and executive produce alongside Emmy nominee Shawn Ryan (“The Shield,” “Terriers”). It is Luhrmann’s first musical endeavor since “Moulin Rouge!”; it will premiere in all territories in 2016.

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