Winston Duke is a Marked Man

The Tobago-born actor Winston Duke has been tapped to play Jamaica’s first National Hero Marcus Garvey in Marked Man, a movie looking at the circumstances that led to his 1923 imprisonment.

The deadline.com website reports that the movie will be released by Amazon Studios, but did not give details about when production will begin.

Its report stated that Andrew Dosunmu will direct Marked Man, with actors Jesse Williams and DeWanda Wise in the running for major roles.

The film is inspired by Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, a 2008 biography by Colin Grant, a British author of Jamaican heritage. The script is written by playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah.

Duke, who moved to New York at age nine with his mother and sister, is best known for playing M’Baku in Black Panther, the 2018 blockbuster movie.

He has had follow-up roles in other hit movies such as Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Marked Man revisits the St Ann-born Garvey’s time in New York, where he was the political head of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

It follows a black man who infiltrates Garvey’s inner circle for the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) who were looking into alleged illegal activity by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organisation Garvey founded in Kingston in 1914.

Garvey was found guilty of mail fraud and sentenced to five years in federal prison. He was released in 1927 and deported to Jamaica. Garvey died at age 52 in London in 1940.

Twenty-nine years later, he was named Jamaica’s first National Hero.