JJ Velasquez came home from prison only 10 months before he began filming Sing Sing. In July of 2022, the actor found himself on set at a decommissioned prison in Fishkill, New York.

Formerly known as Downstate Correctional Facility, it was meant to mimic the A24 film’s titular prison, a mere 40 minutes away.

For his costume, Velasquez donned what looked like his old green prison uniform, and, surrounded by his castmates, the majority of whom were also formerly incarcerated, he remembers asking, “Did anybody ever fathom putting these greens back on?”

Every Sing Sing cast member I interviewed underlined that the film’s mission propelled them forward.

“Our apprehension got outweighed by the purpose,” one of the film’s protagonists, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, says. “We stand on the shoulders of a lot of brothers that sacrificed for us to be here, and we know the power of what this program can do.”

Maclin is referring to Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a program that teaches the arts as a channel for healing and coping skills inside six men’s and women’s prisons in the state of New York.

Based on the true story of RTA members putting on the 2005 original production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code—a musical time-travel comedy that interweaves gladiators, cowboys, pirates, and even Hamlet into its fantastical plot—Sing Sing centers on the friendship between Maclin, who plays himself, and John “Divine G” Whitfield, played by Colman Domingo.

The plot also captures the two men’s pursuit of freedom, with a particular focus on Whitfield’s real-life battle over a wrongful conviction that stood for more than two decades.

sing sing

Courtesy of A24 David “Dap” Giraudy, Sean San José, and Colman Domingo in Sing Sing

The making of Sing Sing, which will be released nationwide on August 23, started eight years ago, when director Greg Kwedar was producing a short documentary inside a Kansas prison.

While on tour, he saw a man working with a rescue dog in his cell.

In that moment, all of my expectations of incarcerated people—a lot of which were built on the movies I’d seen—were upended,” he says.

“There was love in that room.”

Inspired by programs “doing things differently,” Kwedar soon discovered an Esquire article covering the aforementioned Mummy’s Code

“I was struck by the tone of [the play] more than anything, the playfulness of the work juxtaposed against the environment that it was set within,” he recalls.

He approached his writing partner Clint Bentley, and the two reached out to RTA teaching artist and playwright Brent Buell (played by Paul Raci in Sing Sing), who organized a meetup with program alumni in New York City.

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