NEED TO KNOW
PEOPLE can exclusively premiere the trailer for season 12 of Finding Your Roots
The trailer sees many major revelations leave the celebrities shocked, including the reveal that Ava DuVernay is Ferrera’s cousin
Hollywood is getting another lesson in just how connected its stars are.
PEOPLE can exclusively premiere the trailer for season 12 of Finding Your Roots, the PBS series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that takes a deep dive into a new batch of celebrities’ family histories every year. This season, stars including America Ferrera, Kristin Chenoweth, Spike Lee, Lizzo, Brittney Griner and Darren Criss get to learn about their ancestry — and Gates delivers some major revelations.
Right off the bat, the nerves and excitement amongst the guests are clear. “My palms are sweating,” Chris Paul admits.
Amongst the first revelations in the trailer is the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, Flea, learning the identity of his “great-great grandma,” followed by Chenoweth asking the host, “Is that not freaky?”
“That’s freaky,” Gates confirms.
PBS
Kristin Chenoweth in ‘Finding Your Roots’ season 12
Rhiannon Giddens, Lizzy Caplan, Sanaa Lathan and Barry Diller all go on to express how “intense” and “scary” the process is, and Lizzo calls one revelation “scandaloso.”
“Pieces of myself are being filled in,” Delroy Lindo says. “If this is a jigsaw, this is another piece of the jigsaw
For Hasan Minhaj, what Gates discovers makes him “think about a lot of the decisions that I’ve made in my life, and maybe that courage and conviction came from my ancestors.”
Liza Colón-Zayas sheds tears in the trailer as she learns the identity of an ancestor who was enslaved. “It breaks my heart, and I’m crying, not because it’s a total shock to me,” she says. “It’s because now there is a name to this person.”
PBS
America Ferrera in ‘Finding Your Roots’ season 12 trailer
In the trailer, several stars learn the surprising fellow celebrity that they’re related to, including Griner and Colón-Zayas.
Danielle Deadwyler is “gagged” at her surprise relative, while Lizzo says hers is “crazy,” and Ferrera learns that Ava DuVernay is her cousin.
“Oh my God!” Ferrera says. “I love that.”
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When Gates delivers the full family trees to the guests as the trailer comes to an end, Sara Haines deems it “the best gift I’ve ever been given,” and Ferrera says, “It’s like learning there’s a new room in your house that you’ve never seen.”
“This is one of the greatest days of my life,” Lee says, and Diller is equally moved.
“If everybody did this, if everybody actually told the truthful stories, how different it would be,” he says as the trailer ends.
PBS
Spike Lee in ‘Finding Your Roots’ season 12 trailer
Wiz Khalifa, Tracy Letts and Kate Burton also appear on season 12 of the hit series, which Gates. Jr previously told PEOPLE has a “twin message every week.”
“The first is that, despite all of our apparent differences — differences in race, gender, sexual preferences, color, ethnicity, point of origin — at the genome, we’re 99.9% the same,” he said.
“The second is that the greatness of our country was produced by the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, willing and unwilling. It includes everybody in that message. And that’s why people respond to our series with such enthusiasm.”
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Finding Your Roots season 12 premieres Jan. 6 on PBS.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source nz.news.yahoo.com ’
