TV
On 10th Anniversary, Creator Alan Ball Reveals Big Name Stars Who Auditioned for “True Blood”
Believe it or not, it’s now been 10 years since we first met Anna Paquin’s Sookie Stackhouse and Stephen Moyer’s Bill Compton in HBO’s “True Blood,“ which premiered back in September 2008. At its best, the series was a wildly entertaining good time driven by one hell of a fun cast, which also included Ryan Kwanten, Rutina Wesley and Alexander Skarsgård.
Speaking about the show’s cast, series creator Alan Ball reflected over the weekend during a 10th anniversary screening of the pilot that it could’ve been very, very different.
Deadline relays the info…
“Benedict Cumberbatch came and read for Bill,” he said of the role that eventually went to Stephen Moyer. And that’s not all. Jessica Chastain read for what would be Anna Paquin’s role of Sookie Stackhouse. But perhaps most juicy was the news that Jennifer Lawrence was almost a were-panther in Season 3.
“She was great,” Ball said of Lawrence. “But… because she was going to be Jason’s girlfriend, and she was 17 at the time, were like, ‘No that’s gross.’”
Jennifer Lawrence as a were-panther… how wild would that have been?!
There’s a lot going on in the world of Alien at the moment. The original classic is returning to theaters, for starters, and the Xenomorphs will be fighting Marvel’s superheroes in the upcoming mashup comic Aliens vs. Avengers. Of course, the main event for 2024 is Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, a brand new big screen movie set between Alien and Aliens!
With so much going on, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Disney is also working on an “Alien” television series, in the works for FX from creator Noah Hawley (“Legion”).
The Alien franchise’s first ever television series is likely to arrive sometime in 2025, set to be the first story in the franchise that takes place on Earth, roughly 70 years in the future.
FX teases, “Expect a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth.”
So what’s the latest on the “Alien” TV series? Deadline reports today that filming is underway in Thailand, and Sandra Yi Sencindiver (“Foundation”) is the latest actor to sign on.
According to Deadline’s report this morning, the series is set 30 years before the events of the original Alien – Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, meanwhile, takes place 20 years *after* the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien – dealing with “the emergence of the story’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the race between corporations to create new android life.”
Deadline adds in today’s casting report, “We understand that Sencindiver appears in multiple eps and will play a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.”
Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry Darling), Babou Ceesay (“Guerrilla”), Jonathan Ajayi (“Wonder Woman 1984”), Erana James (“Uproar”), Lily Newmark (“Sex Education”), Diêm Camille (“Washington Black”), Adrian Edmondson (“War & Peace”), Timothy Olyphant (“Fargo”), David Rysdahl (“Fargo”), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World), Samuel Blenkin (“Black Mirror”), Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), and Moe Bar-El (The Peripheral) star in the upcoming sci-fi/horror series.
Sydney Chandler is playing a character named Wendy in the series, said to be “a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.”
Sandra Yi Sencindiver in “Foundation”
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