Lovecraft Country is an intriguing TV project from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, which will team with J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot and Misha Green, the creator of Underground, to adapt Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name for HBO. The project, which was just ordered to series, is also produced being by Warner Bros TV. The pilot will be written by Green, who serves as showrunner.
Lovecraft Country Cast
Deadline reports that Tony Goldwyn is set to guest star in Lovecraft Country. Goldwyn (who portrayed President Fitzgerald Grant on Scandal) will play Samuel Braithwhite, patriarch of his family, who views people as assets and objects. Sounds like a charmer!
Wunmi Mosaku has joined the Lovecraft Country cast as a lead. She will play Rudy Dandridge, who’s described as “a hustler just like her half-sister Letitia, only her hustles haven’t paid off. Her family ties are tested when she’s presented with an offer she can’t refuse.”
Mosaku, a Nigerian-English actress, has been quietly accruing high-profile roles, with appearances in the recent Macbeth, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as well as TV runs on Kiri, The End of the F***ing World, Fearless, In the Flesh, and even appeared in the 2016 Black Mirror episode, “Playtest.” She’ll next be seen opposite Idris Elba in the upcoming fifth season of Luther.
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Jurnee Smollett-Bell will play the female lead on the series, set to play Letitia “Leti” Dandridge. According to the character breakdown reported by Variety, she is an artist who hustled her way across the country protesting for civil rights. She how retuned home and is looking to plant some roots.
The show serves as a reunion for Smollett-Bell with Green, who created the WGN America slave drama series Underground. Smollett-Bell was previously featured on HBO as a series regular on the last two seasons of True Blood. Smollett-Bell, who was nominated for two NAACP Image Awards for her breakout role on the series, also starred in the film Eve’s Bayou with Samuel L. Jackson, as well as The Great Debaters, Roll Bounce and Gridiron Gang. Her TV credits include Friday Night Lights and Parenthood.
Jonathan Majors will co-star as Atticus Black. Majors, an American actor, is coming off the Christian Bale-starring 1892-set historical drama, Hostiles, having previously appeared in TV miniseries When We Rise and a TV movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. He’ll next be seen in the September-scheduled, Matthew McConaughey-starring crime movie, White Boy Rick.
Lovercraft Country Details
Lovecraft Country will tell the story of Atticus Black, a 25 year old man who goes on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America looking for his missing father. Atticus and his Uncle George and a friend named Letitia fight the evils that men do and all the evils of that malevolent spirits can steal from an HP Lovecraft novel.
Peele is reclaiming the horror genre from the African-American perspective. Hot off the success of his $5 million social terror film Get Out, it was recently announced that Peele will also develop a new social thriller for Universal Pictures.
“I wanna stay in the genre,” Peele recently told Variety’s Playback Podcast. “While I was developing [Get Out] I was also simultaneously developing four other projects that I call social thrillers. Each one is meant to deal with a different human demon; a different monster that sort of lurks underneath the way that we interact with one another as human beings.
“So I hope to soon direct another one of these social thrillers. It’s not gonna be about race, it’ll be about something else, but it’s gonna be very cinematic and fun. To come up with the perfect monster for a horror movie we really need to look no further than the monster that is all of us. Not so much an individual psycho killer, but the humanity that gets lost between us.”
There is no word yet on when Lovecraft Country will premiere.