Anna Daniels
A slew of TV casting happened this week, and we’re here to tell you all about it. Clarice, a Silence of the Lambs spin-off series that isn’t Hannibal, has found its lead, and so has the Kung Fu reboot. Meanwhile, the new pilot for The Lost Boys TV series has added a bunch of names as well. This will actually be the second attempt at a Lost Boys pilot – Warner Bros. TV fired the entire cast of their original pilot, save for two actors.
Clarice Casting
Rebecca Breeds has been cast as Clarice Starling in Clarice, a new TV spin-off of The Silence of the Lambs on CBS. Per THR, the show is set in 1993, and “takes a deep dive into the untold personal story of Clarice Starling (whom Jodie Foster played in the 1991 film) as she returns to the field to pursue serial murderers and sexual predators while navigating the high-stakes political world of Washington…Clarice is brilliant and vulnerable, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia. Her bravery gives her an inner light that draws monsters and madmen to her. Her complex psychological makeup comes from a challenging childhood, and her drive comes from her need to escape the burden of family secrets that have haunted her throughout her life.”
Hannibal Lecter is unlikely to appear as a character on the show, since the rights issues are a bit of a mess (this is the same reason Clarice Starling never appeared as a character on Hannibal). My knee-jerk reaction to Clarice is that this is a bad idea. But I also thought the same thing as Hannibal, and that turned out to be one of my all-time favorite shows. That said, Hannibal was so great because it was so risky, creative, and unlike anything else on network TV. Will Clarice do the same?
Kung Fu Casting
Kung Fu, the 1970s series starring David Carradine, is getting a gender-flipped reboot. Per The Wrap, Olivia Liang has landed the lead on the CW series, which has the following synopsis:
A quarter-life crisis causes a young Chinese-American woman, Nicky Chen, to drop out of college and go on a life-changing journey to an isolated monastery in China. But when she returns to find her hometown overrun with crime and corruption, Nicky uses her martial arts skills and Shaolin values to protect her community and bring criminals to justice — all while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor and is now targeting her.
The original series ran from 1972 and 1975. There was also a reboot of sorts, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, which aired from 1993 to 1997.
The Lost Boys Casting
Last summer, it was reported that CW’s The Lost Boys TV series was going through a major overhaul. A pilot had already been filmed for the series, but the network was unhappy with the results, and proceeded to let the entire cast – save for two actors, Medalion Rahimi and Dakota Shapiro – go. Now, they’re trying again with new actors. Per Deadline, Branden Cook, Lincoln Younes, and Ruby Cruz are now the leads of the vampire series.
In the show, “when a mother and her Gen Z sons, one played by Cook, move to the seaside town where she grew up, they discover there’s a sinister reason the local cool kids sleep all day, party all night, never grow up and never get old. Family bonds are tested as the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of a mythological struggle.” The series is a take on the 1987 movie of the same name, which featured cool vampire teens hanging out and eating Chinese food. Here’s who the new actors are playing:
Cook plays Garrett, the older of the two brothers who have moved with their mom to the North Carolina seaside community. He is a version of the Michael character in the movie, which was played by Jason Patric.
Younes plays Benjamin, the charismatic leader of the gang of vampires in the town. It is a version of the David character played in the movie by Kiefer Sutherland.
Cruz plays Elsie, a version of Jami Gertz’s character Star in the movie, who sparks with the new guy in town, Garrett.
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