‘Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist’ Cast and Creators Explain Why They Made a (Hit) Series About “Dreamers”
Near the end of the second episode of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist’s three-episode debut, one of New York City’s fiercest and deadliest gangsters, Frank Moten, played by Samuel L. Jackson, hovers over a petrified small-time Atlanta hustler known as Chicken Man, played by Kevin Hart, after leaving a historic boxing match in that Southern city in 1970.
Moten and his henchmen have taken Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams and a Miami gangster named Harvey (Celestino Cornielle) out to a field in Atlanta, where he quickly executes the Florida crime boss for making insulting comments to him before the unsanctioned boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry. Chicken Man had made the mistake of trying to run a scam on Moten while he was watching the fight and made a promise he couldn’t deliver on, which resulted in his invitation out to the field for a final destination.
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Yet, Chicken Man survives after giving an impassioned explanation about why he lied and why he so desperately wanted the New York mobster’s attention: He has a vision of helping Moten expand his crime empire in Atlanta. He wants to be his right-hand man and help Moten turn Atlanta into “Black Vegas.” Moten also has a vision for the city, one that goes beyond gambling and criminality. His vision includes economic growth and generational wealth for its Black citizens. Moten wants to create a “Black Mecca,” building new homes and businesses, he tells Chicken Man, “and we become kings!” Chicken Man’s aspirations motivate Moten to spare his life.
Both men’s visions serve as the main catalyst that drives Peacock’s limited eight-episode series, which is carved from a 2020 iHeart true-crime podcast about actual events that happened in Atlanta in 1970, culminating with one of the most audacious armed robberies in the city’s history. Fight Night became a quick hit for Peacock, becoming the streamer’s most watched original title.
Although Chicken Man escaped the near-death encounter, what ensues is Hart’s character taking the New York gangster and his henchmen to a private house party, where they all end up having shotguns put in their faces; are made to strip down to their underwear in a cold basement; and are robbed of their money and jewelry. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Jackson — who lived in Atlanta at the time of the events the series is based on — believes there isn’t a simple answer to why Moten let Chicken Man survive in all of their early encounters.
“I think Moten understood that this this dude was being manipulated in some way, plus there was a lot of chaos that ensued,” Jackson explains. “By the time they got out, Chicken Man wasn’t there and Moten was trying to find him. I told Kevin [Hart] when I took the job, ‘Now every time you see me, you gotta think I’m gonna kill you, so no comedy will ensue between the two of us.’ And that was how they constructed the story. Ordinarily, we would have grabbed his ass up and he would have been dead the same way when we had the other guy from Miami. He lucked out.
“But that’s part of the fantasy of it all,” Jackson continues. “We need Chicken Man to tell the story, and Chicken Man did live, that’s a fact. The facts, you can’t change. You can fantasize around a lot of stuff, but you can’t change the facts.”
The facts are that, after the robbery at the house afterparty, Moten, other invited gangsters from around the country and the Atlanta Police Department were looking for suspects and someone to blame for the heist. Of course, first on the list would be Chicken Man. He put the festivities together. However, wanting to prove his innocence and seeking protection from mobsters who wanted to extract revenge, Chicken Man would eventually seek out the help of one Atlanta’s first Black police detectives in a segregated south, J.D. Hudson, played by Don Cheadle.
Having finished his detail of protecting Ali, Hudson is assigned the house robbery case and is initially on the trail of Chicken Man, whom he once sent to prison for his petty crimes. But as he goes deeper into his investigation, Hudson’s instincts tell him the small-time hustler may not have orchestrated the robbery.
“In Hudson’s own words, he said, ‘Look, if you’re my mom and I think you’re guilty, you have to go down,’” Cheadle tells THR as to why he thought the detective helped Chicken Man. “And he was like, ‘If I hate you and you’re my enemy, and you’re innocent, I’m going to fight for you.’ And I think at the end of the day, he believed he was doing right by Chicken Man, irrespective of how he felt about him personally. He was like, ‘This isn’t right and I’m going to do what I have been honorably sworn to do.’ It was not an empty oath that he made, he meant it and was willing to risk everything to stand on business.”
Will Packer, executive producer for Fight Night, and series showrunner Shaye Ogbonna tell THR the series is clearly meant to be a love letter to Atlanta, whose economy has become known as a “Black Mecca” for African Americans in business and the entertainment industry.
“It was pitched to me now some nine years ago,” Packer says (he also produced the original iHeart podcast). “It was a story I did not know, had not heard of, and when I heard it, I was like, ‘How have I not heard this story?’ Because it’s got such incredible cinematic elements to it: Muhammad Ali, greatest athlete in the world; an unsanctioned boxing match; gangsters who came from all over to come to that boxing match; and then to go to an underground casino party that then gets robbed by hustlers? I just thought, this is incredible! It would be great to bring it to life.
“We ultimately turned it into a podcast, which allowed us to tell the story in multiple parts and take time to develop the characters,” Packer continues of the series’ origins. “Then, we needed a great writer to help us put it together in limited series form. Enter: Shaye Ogbonna. Then we could go after the dream cast. Kevin Hart was the first one in, and we went in and had conversations one-on-one with Sam Jackson, Don Cheadle, and with Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard. Then we’ve got an amazing group of young gunners coming in that you guys are going to see and hopefully love, from Chloe Bailey to Melvin Gregg to Myles Bullock and Sinqua Walls. There’s a brother named Jalyn Hall who plays Baby Ray who’s great. Their names may not be household names now, but I hope in a few years you look back and say, ‘Wow, remember when so and so went toe-to-toe with Samuel Jackson? And look at them now!’”
Ogbonna saw Fight Night as a “soul food mix” of a few different genres, as he worked to turn the podcast into a streaming series.
“It’s a crime drama, it’s a buddy flick. Atlanta is a character,” Ogbonna recounts. “There are so many things we are trying to do here, but I thought we did it seamlessly. And it’s because it really takes a village, whether you are talking about hair and makeup for authenticity or production design. Will talked about this, but he lives in Atlanta; I’m from Atlanta. It’s very important we represent this accurately and with great authenticity, because we will get called out if we don’t.”
A sub-storyline that gets explored with a great amount detail in Fight Night is the racism that Detective Hudson faced among the rank and file within the Atlanta Police Department, although he had steadfastly fought to make the city safe for all its citizens since joining the force in 1948. Even in 1970, Hudson persevered while trying to call out rogue cops and facing racial name-calling and harassment from some fellow officers who were supposed to have his back.
“He saw that the only way out was through,” Cheadle explains as to why he believes Hudson never quit the force. “Quitting was not an option, stepping back was not an option. Trying to force things into the world the way he wanted them to be was the only way to work. And I think he saw himself, rightfully, as someone who would hold the door open and let others come in behind him, and would bear the brunt of that institutionalized racism that he was dealing with to hopefully get to the other side where there would be more representation, and greater justice for people who look like him and who came from the communities he came from. So, he had to just take it on. And it’s a thankless position. He was seen in his own community as a pariah a lot of the time. But he had a vision about what needed to be done, and he felt like he had the big shoulders to take it on.”
And be it Hudson, Chicken Man or a killer like Moten, Fight Night reveals that all three men have something in common, in Packer’s assessment.
“It is a show about dreamers,” Packer says. “And whether you’re talking about Chicken Man, Frank Moten or about Taraji P. Henson (who plays Chicken Man’s business partner and mistress, Vivian Thomas), they’re all dreamers! Frank’s character is a big gangster and Chicken Man, Kevin Hart’s character, is a small-town numbers runner. Taraji’s character, Vivian, is an ex-stripper who is Chicken Man’s right hand. They all have this dream of being more than they currently are. They think: ‘If we just had the opportunity, there’s so much more we could do.’ And Atlanta feels like a key to that success for them.
“When I first moved to Atlanta, after graduating from Florida A&M University, I had a U-Haul and a dream,” Packer continues. “And my dream was to become a big successful filmmaker. And I felt like Atlanta was a place that I could do it. I was a dreamer, just like these characters. I felt like, ‘If I just had the opportunity, I could show people what I got.’ And so, to me there’s a parallel between what they were doing and what Atlanta still represents to this day.”
Jackson also has a history with Atlanta. Not only was he living there in 1970 when the events of Fight Night took place, but a year prior in 1969, while a student at the prestigious HBCU all-men’s college of Morehouse, Jackson participated in an act that some Black college folklore has him listed as a legend.
“When I got kicked out of school?” Jackson responds in amusement when asked about the incident, when he held Morehouse trustees hostage and got expelled for two years. “It was all about trying to change the culture of the school I was in, in terms of what they were giving us for the money we were paying. And us moving forward as a race; the kinds of education we were getting; the kind of community involvement we did not have; the kind of classes we need to take that we weren’t taking. So, we took the board of trustees hostage and locked them in a building. We were trying to change the trajectory of the Morehouse man.”
Jackson says that was part of an educational vision for his life and future generations at that college, and things did change. He saw the same vision, dreams and changes for the city of Atlanta after those historic events portrayed in Fight Night. It only took about four years to start manifesting itself.
“When Maynard Jackson became mayor of Atlanta [in 1974], things started to change,” Jackson explains. “Because that airport was sort of the key to open the city up, and he knew it. It became a hub for Delta and in it a place where a lot of Black businesses operated. When they built that airport, I think Maynard required them to use many Black construction companies. He required a certain number of Black businesses inside that airport in terms of food and services. And through that, people gravitated to and started to stay in Atlanta. They came down there to go to school. Atlanta became this other thing.
“By the time they got a football team and a basketball team, the city opened up in a whole other kind of way, and then the music started to happen,” he continues, “which drew another group of people into the city. But the pulse of the city was hard, fast and growing! And anybody with any sense or any vision could see that Atlanta was going to be what it became. It used to be that place where you said, ‘When you’re in Atlanta, you’re in Atlanta. But as soon as you leave Atlanta, you’re in Georgia.’
“So, you’ve got to learn how to live your life in that kind of way. All your city ways don’t work when you get outside here,” says Jackson with a laugh. “But Atlanta spread out when all these people showed up. Now, it’s growing up! Everywhere you look at, there’s a crane. There were like 19 cranes around my hotel.”
Essentially, the city became what Frank’s vision was, as is explored in Fight Night as the series continues to roll out. “He had the right idea when he wanted that land over there by the airport,” says Jackson. “Because that’s valuable: it wasn’t gold, it was platinum. He understood that because his grandmother told him that they had a legacy that was theirs: ‘That red clay, that’s our blood that’s in that dirt, so we’re owed that.’ And she was right.”
Fight Night releases new episodes Thursdays on Peacock.
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