The first images from upcoming romance Southside With You, about the day-long first date enjoyed by Barack and Michelle Obama in 1989, have hit the web.
The film stars Parker Sawyers, best known for Hyde Park on Hudson, Zero Dark Thirty and Austenland, as the future US president. Get On Up and Ride Along’s Tika Sumpter plays his future wife, then a young lawyer called Michelle Robinson.
The Obamas enjoyed lunch at the Art Institute of Chicago and watched a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing during their epic first romantic encounter. The pair also kissed outside a Baskin Robbins ice cream parlour, where there is now a plaque to mark the moment.
At the time, Obama was a first-year Harvard Law student working as an associate at Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, where the younger Robinson was his boss. The Obamas married in 1992.
Sawyers, 31, told the Telegraph in May that winning the role of Obama was an “honour”. The actor added: “You just try to stay calm but then people ask: do you think he’ll watch it? And I’m like, oh man he will watch it, won’t he?”
Actor Richard Tanne, best known for comedy Worst Friends, will make his directing debut on the film, working from his own screenplay. Southside With You began shooting this month and does not yet have a confirmed release date.
Sawyers is due to star next in Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden biopic Snowden, while Sumpter, 35, has Ride Along 2 on her slate.
