At the tail end of last year, TNT ordered a pilot episode of a TV series based on Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer. We’ve subsequently learned that Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange) will direct the pilot, and now we’ve got the first casting news for ya.
Via Deadline, Hamilton and “Black-ish” star Daveed Diggs has just come aboard as Layton Well, a prisoner barely surviving the harsh conditions in the tail end of the train. A quiet thinker who spends his days sniffing the industrial-waste-turned-drug Chronole and tending to his cage full of rats, Layton becomes a reluctant participant in a struggle that could upend life on the train.
The hour-long drama pilot, a co-production of Tomorrow Studios and Turner’s Studio T, is a futuristic thriller set seven years after the world has become a frozen wasteland, and the remnants of humanity inhabit a gigantic, perpetually moving train that circles the globe. Class warfare, social injustice and the politics of survival are questioned in this riveting television adaptation.
The showrunner of the series will be Josh Friedman (Avatar 4, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), who also acts as writer and executive producer. The show will also be executively produced by Tomorrow Studios’ Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements as well as the originals films Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Tae-hun and Dooho Choi.