Wu-Tang: An American Saga: Johnell Young has been casted as GZA in Hulu Drama Series

LOS ANGELES - March 19, 2019 - PRLog -- It is only fitting that actor Johnell Young, Staten Island native, portray GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan.  This is Johnell's breakout year as he will appear in Tales on BET next month, and you will see him in NBA2k this summer.  If you watched All Eyez on Me movie on DVD, Johnell played Ray Luv in 2017.

Hulu's Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a 10 episode drama from the Wu-Tang Clan frontman The RZA, writer Alex Tse, and Imagine Television will start filming soon. The series was created and written by The RZA and Tse, based on the  Wu-Tang Clan, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop history.  They will explore and expand the band's world.

Set in early '90s New York at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, the show tracks the Clan's formation, a vision of Bobby Diggs aka The RZA, who strives to unite a dozen young, black men that are torn between music and crime but eventually rise to become the unlikeliest of American success stories.

Imagine's Brian Grazer and Francie Calfo will executive produce with Tse and Wu-Tang Clan members The RZA and Method Man. Fellow Wu-Tang Clan members Ghostface Killa, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa and GZA as well as the Estate of Ol' Dirty Bastard, will serve as consulting producers. James Seidman will oversee the project for Imagine.

GZA, a founding member of the hip hop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music) group the Wu-Tang Clan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu-Tang_Clan), GZA is the group's "spiritual head", being both the oldest and the first within the group to receive a record deal. He has appeared on his fellow Clan members' solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career starting with Liquid Swords (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Swords) (1995).

His lyrical style often dismisses typical rap story lines in favor of science and wide-ranging philosophies and has been characterized as "armed with sharp metaphors and a smooth flow". An analysis of GZA's lyrics found that he has the fourth largest vocabulary in popular hip hop music. He teamed up with an education group to promote science education in New York City (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City) through hip hop.