Anna Daniels
Ryan Murphy loves some glitz and glamor in his TV series — he’s played with the dark side of both in his acclaimed series Feud and American Crime Story. Now the screenwriter and director is tackling Tinseltown at its most glamorous with a new Netflix limited series Hollywood. The Netflix miniseries, co-created with frequent collaborator Ian Brennan, is a revisionist homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood, following a group of actors as they mingle with both real and fictional movie stars in post-World War II Hollywood. See the Hollywood first look images below.
Hollywood First Look
Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Rock Hudson, Hattie McDaniel, Anna May Wong. All real-life stars with their own real-life issues — some of which Murphy had covered before like in the Crawford and Bette Davis-centric Feud — but given a revisionist twist in Hollywood, the latest project from Murphy’s lucrative deal under Netflix. What starts off as a strict historical retelling becomes a blend of fact and fiction that Murphy has started calling “faction,” the creator told Vanity Fair.
Executive producer, writer, and director Janet Mock also said in a statement accompanying the release of the first look images (which you can see above), that this is a series that spins “an aspirational tale of what ifs: What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay?”
Some of these things we know — matinee heartthrob Rock Hudson was a closeted gay man — but it will be interesting to see how these other revelations (real and fictitious) unfold in Hollywood. The cast — which includes David Corenswet as Jack, Darren Criss as Raymond, Jeremy Pope as Archie, Laura Harrier as Camille, Samara Weaving as Claire, Dylan McDermott as Ernie, Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Patti LuPone as Avis, Jim Parsons as Henry Willson, Jake Picking as Rock Hudson, Joe Mantello as Dick, and Maude Apatow as Henrietta — certainly looks the part in the above images. But the most uncanny resemblance is Michelle Krusiec as Anna May Wong, with the Taiwanese-American actress proving to be a dead ringer for the Asian-American icon.
Here is the synopsis for Hollywood:
A new limited series from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, HOLLYWOOD follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost. Each character offers a unique glimpse behind the gilded curtain of Hollywood’s Golden Age, spotlighting the unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day. Provocative and incisive, HOLLYWOOD exposes and examines decades-old power dynamics, and what the entertainment landscape might look like if they had been dismantled.
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