Trailer
Plot summary
In 1841, Solomon Northup is a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York, supporting his wife and two children by playing the violin. Two white strangers, Brown and Hamilton, offer him a short-term job playing music, and he travels with them to Washington, D.C. There they drug him and hand him over to James H. Birch, who runs a slave pen. When he insists that he is free, he is beaten. Shipped toward New Orleans with other captives, he is warned to keep his head down and to hide that he can read and write. The trader Theophilus Freeman gives him the name Platt and sells him to the plantation owner William Ford, who gives him a violin.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about 12 Years a Slave (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- After Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley both won Oscars, reports described an ongoing feud over screenplay credit: McQueen asked for shared credit, Ridley refused, and Fox Searchlight sided with Ridley. Neither thanked the other in his acceptance speech.
- The film won three Academy Awards, and its Best Picture win made director Steve McQueen the first Black producer to ever receive that award and the first Black director of a Best Picture winner.
- Four historic antebellum plantations were used as locations: Felicity, Bocage, Destrehan and Magnolia. Magnolia, in Schriever, Louisiana, is just a few miles from one of the historic sites where the real Solomon Northup was held; Chiwetel Ejiofor called being there "dancing with ghosts."
- Costume designer Patricia Norris had eight weeks and made nearly 1,000 costumes in an earth-toned palette, taking earth samples from all three of the plantations so the clothes would match the soil.
- Because nobody knows how slaves sounded in the 1840s, dialect coach Michael Buster used rural samples from Mississippi and Louisiana for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender and real upper-class New Orleanians from the 1930s for Benedict Cumberbatch; Kenyan-born Lupita Nyong'o shifted her speech to American.
- The scenes set in Washington, D.C. were not shot there: filming took place at the Columns Hotel and Madame John's Legacy in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
