It turns out, you can stage a fake movie to smuggle the founder of the Black Panther Party out of the country — and still never escape Warren Beatty’s shadow. Just ask Alessandro Nivola, who swears his character, Bert Schneider, fancied himself Beatty in Shampoo before falling for Huey Newton’s radical mystique. “Bert wanted to be Warren Beatty,” Nivola says. “Then he fell in love with Huey and decided his life had another purpose.” Not exactly the Hollywood ending he signed up for.
Apple TV+’s The Big Cigar spins the true-ish tale of Huey Newton’s improbable Cuban exile like a 70s fever dream — equal parts revolution, high-stakes caper, and comedic meltdown. It’s got an FBI manhunt, clandestine breakfast programs, and a fake film that blows up in all the worst ways. “I had no idea about this story,” PJ Byrne admits. “Zero clue. I didn’t even know how much the Panthers did outside of the headlines. The free breakfast programs? That’s still feeding millions of kids today.”
For Tiffany Boone, playing Gwen Fontaine meant pushing back against decades of women getting reduced to side characters in other people’s revolutions. “Gwen was not a bystander,” Boone says. “There were hundreds of women doing the backbone work — cooking, cleaning, raising children, running meetings. It’s important to show they weren’t just props.” She’s still hoping someone out there can dig up an actual Gwen interview — she couldn’t find one to study. “In some ways, it takes the pressure off,” Boone shrugs. “But she’s still alive. She could watch this and be like, ‘Girl, what was that?’”
The series has its big emotional gut punches — and its silent ones too. Nivola admits that playing Bert meant a lot of listening and even more staring. “Could I have been a silent movie star?” he wonders aloud. “Was I giving Rudy Valentino? Why wasn’t I alive in 1919?” PJ Byrne, for one, swears the eyes did the talking. “When I’m undressing him in that scene — the lights are on, man. He’s not saying much, but he’s saying a ton.”
Not everything in The Big Cigar is heavy. Just ask PJ about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which has a hilarious reference point in the series). “Loved it?” I ask. “I hated it!” he cackles. “I thought it was hysterical that my character gets to dump on that movie in the middle of everything else blowing up.” Sometimes a silly punchline is the best way to make the history go down.
So yes — The Big Cigar is a serious, complicated, wildly entertaining new chapter in how we remember Huey Newton and the Panthers. But underneath the iconic images and Hollywood illusions are real people who, as PJ reminds us, still had to make the choice to do the right thing. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” he says, quoting the proverb.
Or, in Bert Schneider’s case: if you want to flee the FBI, better get the fake movie crew rolling before the credits catch up.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
