Taraji P. Henson has been a part of some pretty impressive ensembles over her storied career. But on her first day with the cast of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist, she found herself getting chills. Kevin Hart and Terrence Howard and Samuel L. Jackson were there, filming alongside her; other big names including Don Cheadle and Chloe Bailey were hanging around the production too. “I had an out-of-body experience…looking over at the extras like, ‘I remember when I did all of that extra work,’” the Color Purple star says. “It was just like a full-circle moment. I was like, ‘This is everything you dream about. This is everything you saw yourself doing.’”

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It wasn’t just the cast, but the scope of the project as well. Fight Night, which Vanity Fair can exclusively reveal will premiere on Peacock on September 5, marked an opportunity to tell “the origin story of Atlanta,” as executive producer Will Packer puts it. The Hollywood veteran (Ride Along, Girls Trip) assembled an all-star team to scale up that stranger-than-fiction tale into a raucous epic, with crazy characters and a dizzying plot putting the sparkle on a deeper examination of the American dream. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about something in my life,” Hart tells me.

Adapted from the podcast of the same name (which Packer also produced), Fight Night takes an expansive look at the build-up to, and aftermath of, Muhammad Ali’s 1970 comeback fight in Atlanta—the night of which erupted into chaos with one of the largest armed robberies in the country’s history. In this telling, the drama centers on Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Hart), a lottery kingpin who’d organized the after-party that was targeted—and who’d been suspected of masterminding the heist too—as well as JD Hudson (Cheadle), the cop tasked with investigating the crime and one of the first Black detectives in the city.

“I want people to come out of this feeling like they got an authentic slice of what life was like for Black Americans living in Atlanta in the ’70s,” Packer says. The show, created by Shaye Ogbonna (The Chi) and directed largely by Craig Brewer (Dolemite Is My Name) in his trademark style, makes the persuasive, fascinating argument that this collision of events—the eyes of the nation on Ali’s controversial return, and then on a spectacular crime that needed to be cleaned up—led to a rapid citywide turnaround. “This vibrant dynamic is the embodiment of the American dream,” Ogbonna says. “In a period of about 25 to 30 years, Atlanta went from this city so associated with a dark time in our country, in terms of Jim Crow, to an Olympic city and the Black Hollywood, for lack of a better term.”

To get it right, Fight Night would need to go as starry and ambitious as the events it depicted. When it came time to bring the podcast to TV, Hart was Packer’s first call—bringing him back to a subject he expected to leave well in the past.

Just before the pandemic, Kevin Hart and Chadwick Boseman were slated to star in a remake of the Sidney Poitier–Bill Cosby comedy vehicle Uptown Saturday Night. That movie’s inciting robbery incident was inspired by the events depicted in Fight Night. “It was kind of a sour spot attached to that world, and I didn’t want to touch it at all—being that me and Chadwick were so close,” Hart says. (Boseman died of colon cancer in 2020.) A longtime friend of Hart’s, Packer eventually suggested they tell the real story instead. “I said that the only way I would do it is if we could turn it into a drama,” Hart says. “That way I didn’t feel like I was doing what Chadwick and I were going to do. It was something different.”

That goes for the tone of the project, and for Hart’s performance as well. While the comedian has successfully ventured into dramatic work, it feels safe to say he’s never taken on a role as emotionally unpredictable as Chicken Man.

“You’re talking about a hustler, you’re talking about a true entrepreneur—a guy who was chaotic to a certain degree, but driven,” Hart says. “He was a visionary. He saw the city of Atlanta becoming so much more than what Atlanta probably intended for itself.” A workhorse performer and producer, Hart rather famously possesses a similar level of ambition, and you can feel him sinking his teeth into this character.

“I told him in the beginning of his career, ‘We know you’re funny, man; I want to see you do that drama,’” says Henson, herself a comedian turned dramatic actor. “I still think he has another layer left that we haven’t seen yet.”

“I’ve seen all of his work and I’ve been there for a lot of it…and this is a character that is more vulnerable than any character that Kevin has ever played before,” Packer says. “Chicken Man loves the streets because they feed him. He’s a numbers runner, and in order to be good at that, you’ve got to know people—be charismatic, be fast-talking. So when he gets into a place where his street life [and] his home life are all at odds, he is forced to take an unflinching look at himself and who he is in the mirror. It’s tough.”

Hart is surrounded by Oscar nominees at the top of their game. Henson brings vivacity to Chicken Man’s right hand, Vivian, with whom he’s also having an affair. “The woman pays attention, and what I love is she finally gets her power,” Henson says. “Any obstacle that she faces, she uses that as a way to learn something and to springboard her into the next place she’s trying to go in life.” Cheadle serves as the emotional anchor in many ways, trailing power players in Atlanta’s burgeoning Black community while navigating a racist policing structure. And Howard is a hell of a good time as the crime lord Cadillac Richie.

“We called everybody individually,” Packer reveals. “We got Taraji on the phone, we got Don Cheadle on the phone.” Hart says those direct asks were crucial to packaging Fight Night: “It’s relationships, it’s phone calls, it’s making sure that you have the bandwidth to pull off the thing that you said that you’re going to pull off.”

When it came to bringing in one particular cast member, though, the team got more in return than they could have expected.

“We had a historian on set who just happens to be one of the greatest actors who ever walked the planet.” Ogbonna is talking about Samuel L. Jackson, who transforms as Frank Moten, the imposing head of a powerful New York crime syndicate that proves crucial to Chicken Man’s grand plans. The Fight Night producers knew Jackson would bring his acting chops to the table. What they didn’t realize is that Jackson actually lived in Atlanta at the time of the heist.

On the first day of shooting, the crew set up cameras in the neighborhood of Collier Heights, at the exact house where the robbery took place. “Sam just shows up—it’s not even his day to shoot—and he hadn’t been in the neighborhood for a long time,” Ogbonna says. Jackson then delivered a kind of history lesson. He shared that he’d gotten married at the church around the corner some 40 years earlier, that he knew of people involved in the robbery, that Black cops’ ability to simply do their jobs was severely restricted. He worked with Ogbonna et al. on the research, weaving in his own memories of the time to enhance the show’s verisimilitude.

For the sheer amount of series and films that shoot in Atlanta—at this point, given tax incentives, the city often stands in for Los Angeles, New York, and everything in between—it’s rare for a production to bring the city itself to life. “It was like, how do we do justice to this city that right now is the home of so many massive productions?” says Bryan Smiley, who serves as an EP on Fight Night along with Hart through their Hartbeat banner. “All the locations we shot at were indicative of what the city has been and felt like.” Brewer, who helms the first two and final two episodes, sets a tone that captures the fun, seedy debauchery of the era. “It feels like you are actually being transported back into a time when things were groovy and hip and you had cat daddies and sugar mamas,” Packer says with a laugh. “That attention to detail was very, very important.”

So while Fight Night certainly takes viewers on a ride—Ogbonna cites Ocean’s Eleven and Die Hard as genre influences—it’s in service of prickly, complex ideas that linger. “It’s a story of dreamers,” Packer says—including a Black detective who couldn’t shower in the same facilities as his white counterparts, a gangster returning to his Southern roots to be a part of a city’s transformation, and of course, Chicken Man himself. The show cannily, wryly reframes the very idea of the American dreamer. “In most movies and most TV shows that would explore a world like this, Chicken Man would be marginalized, just be seen as a criminal,” Ogbonna says. “But growing up where I grew up, hustlers were multidimensional. They were family men, they were community men. They went to church. They were political.”

Sounds a lot like what Kevin Hart brings to life in Fight Night. “A dream isn’t just a dream; a dream is real, and something others will later discover if you do it correctly,” Hart says. “And Chicken Man is a dreamer.”