Kenya Bar­ris will make his direc­to­r­i­al debut with a Richard Pry­or biopic

It would seem that Kenya Bar­ris has it all: pop­u­lar­i­ty and acclaim in his capac­i­ty as showrun­ner of TV’s Black-ish, cre­ator cred­its on a pair of spin­offs, fur­ther indus­try cachet as the co-writer of the screen­plays for Girls Trip and the recent Shaft sequel, and so much mon­ey that he’s got a show on Net­flix about it. But there’s still one fron­tier he has yet to con­quer, a state of mat­ters that will soon change as the Hol­ly­wood heavy­weight directs his first feature.

Today Dead­line broke the news that Bar­ris will set­tle into the director’s chair on a biopic of leg­endary come­di­an Richard Pry­or, to be pro­duced in coop­er­a­tion with MGM and Pryor’s wid­ow Jen­nifer Lee. Bar­ris will also write the screen­play for the film, though the search is on for the kind of live-wire tal­ent who can cap­ture Pryor’s unpre­dictable, volatile energy.

Pry­or rose to the top of the stand-up com­e­dy cir­cuit in the ​’70s with his unspar­ing, pro­fane wit that often employed shock­ing lan­guage to expose harsh truths about racial inequity in Amer­i­ca. Despite a trou­bled upbring­ing marked by aban­don­ment and abuse, he went on to enjoy fame and respect unmatched by any com­ic of his day, though his demons plagued him through an addict­ed adulthood.

Pry­or him­self gave his sto­ry the movie treat­ment with the 1986 writer-direc­tor-star vehi­cle Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Call­ing – pre­sum­ably, the new project will cov­er dif­fer­ent ground in the man’s life and times. Many have tried and failed to bring Pryor’s sto­ry to the big screen before, the most recent attempt com­ing in 2016 under Har­vey Wein­stein with a star-stud­ded cast includ­ing Oprah Win­frey, Eddie Mur­phy, Mike Epps, and Kate Hud­son.

A film like this lives or dies on the cast­ing of the lead role, how­ev­er, and find­ing an actor capa­ble of chan­nel­ing the charis­ma and frus­tra­tion of Pry­or is no small task. Who can affect the edge, the soul, the intel­lect, all while pulling off the mus­tache? Noth­ing less than a true blue movie star will do.