Jordan Peele’s ‘High Horse: The Black Cowboy’ Documentary Gets Peacock Premiere Date, 1st Trailer

The powerful trailer for Jordan Peele’s latest project, High Horse: The Black Cowboy, is officially here — three years after his 2022 film, Nope.

“If there were no Black cowboys, then America wouldn’t exist,” writer Michael Harriot explains early in the trailer for the three-part series, produced by Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.

“The Black cowboy was intentionally removed from the story, so we can create the myth of the American white cowboy,” another person says in the trailer, which was released via YouTube on Thursday, November 6.

The trailer immediately sets the tone for the docuseries — a deep-dive into both the history and erasure of Black cowboys in American culture. The trailer opens with a scene featuring two men — each wearing cowboy hats, scarves around their mouths and long black coats — as they square off against one another on a dusty street. The scene then reveals one of the men is Black, while the other is white.

Peele’s documentary will premiere on Peacock on November 20, and features interviews with Pam Grier, Tina Knowles, Lori Harvey, Bun B and more.

“I’m grateful to Monkeypaw for amplifying the powerful voices and long-standing culture of Black Cowboys and Cowgirls,” Peele said in a statement shared online. “Through High Horse: The Black Cowboy, on Peacock, their history is inseparable from the story of our country. And this project aims to honor and celebrate their lasting legacy.”

The docuseries is directed by Jason Perez and executive produced by Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Keisha Senter, Jamal Watson, Mari Keiko Gonzalez, Liz Yale Marsh, Kadine Anckle, Tom Casciato, Sacha Jenkins and Keith McQuirter.

The film is Peele’s newest since 2022’s Nope, a sci-fi horror thriller starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as a brother and sister who operate the only Black-owned horse ranch in Agua Dulce, California. The family trains and rents out horses for movies and TV shows being produced in Hollywood, until their father is struck and killed by a mysterious object falling from the sky.

In a June 2022 interview with Fandango, Peele explained he wrote the film in part as an effort to get audiences back into theaters to see movies.

“I wrote it in a time when we were a little bit worried about the future of cinema,” Peele said. “So the first thing I knew is I wanted to create a spectacle. I wanted to create something that the audience would have to come see.”

He continued: “So I set my sights on the great American UFO story. And the movie itself deals with spectacle, and the good and bad that come from this idea of attention. It’s a horror epic, but it has some points in it that are meant to elicit a very audible reaction in the theater.”

In fact, Peele was so focused on the audience while writing the movie that he even titled the film after the one word he most hoped attendees would yell out while watching. “So hopefully, when we go see it, we’re going to hear a lot of ‘nope!’” he added.