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March 9 (UPI) -- Regé-Jean Page is co-producing a new scripted series for Peacock about eight of Muhammad Ali's legendary fights. Kevin Willmott and Morgan Freeman will also co-produce. Willmott is the co-writer for Spike Lee's Black KkKlansman. The script won the pair an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2019.
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Excellence: 8 Fights will use eight of Ali's classic bouts as a jumping-off point to tell the story behind the fights and how they impacted Ali and the people around him, as well as the pop culture landscape he was a part of throughout his career.
As first reported by Deadline, Page is not starring in the series.
After his breakout role in Bridgerton, Page, 34, has appeared in The Gray Man, one of the most successful movies in Netflix history, and will star next in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
It's perhaps no surprise that Page would embrace a historical series and make it one of his first production projects. In Bridgerton he was cast as the Duke Of Hastings, a period role in what many perceive as an all-white milieu.
In an interview with GQ UK, Page, who grew up in Zimbabwe, said that although Black French soldiers fought with the military in two world wars, white soldiers were the ones photographed for the victory marches, thus rewriting history.
"The reason you think history is white is because you've been lied to," Jean-Page says. "It's not that we're being politically correct. It's that we've been, very deliberately, politically incorrect."
