lucy maud montgomery anne of green gables

And that helped me focus on the story I had to tell, and the journey my character Sebastian was on,” he added.

“I auditioned last year, and I just didn’t think about that fact when I was shooting the show. Abuzeid added the impact of his character helping update a classic Canadian story with diversity is only now setting in as the second season gets set to launch. “We became excited to also include this little known historic place into our story to explore themes involving, prejudice, intolerance, racism and inclusion,” Walley-Beckett said. And the idea of an Afro-Caribbean character emerged after research revealed Charlottetown, PEI, at one time had a mid-to-late 1800s neighborhood, The Bog, where the city’s marginalized black community lived. So Walley-Beckett and her all-female writers room had Gilbert Blythe, played by 20th Century Women star Lucas Jade Zumann, travel abroad at the end of the first season and make friends with people from other cultures. “When I was first conceiving Anne With an E, I was troubled by the lack of diversity in the book, especially since Canada is such a diverse nation, both then and now,” she said.

Sebastian is introduced as a friend of Gilbert Blythe, the love interest of Anne Shirley, played by Amybeth McNulty.Īnne With an E creator and showrunner Moira Walley-Beckett said she deliberately made her dark Anne of Green Gables reboot more multicultural for its second season. His character, Sebastian Lacroix, is originally from Trinidad and arrives in fictional Avonlea as a manual laborer who stokes coal in the engine room of a steamship. “It’s incredible the way I’m being introduced into a story that already has this history and this audience, and that means so much because I get to be part of that story with the new perspective of an Afro-Caribbean in the world of Anne,” Abuzeid told The Hollywood Reporter.

Lucy maud montgomery anne of green gables