Ask most actors these days about whether they’d prefer to work in television or film, and they’ll tell you they follow the writing. I don’t need to remind you that the small screen has some of the best narratives going these days, and Michael Shannon knows it. After his breakout turn on HBO‘s “Boardwalk Empire,” the actor kicked off 2018 by returning to television for Paramount Networks‘ “Waco.” Now, he’s got another series cooking, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Shannon is joining Park Chan-Wook‘s limited series adaptation of John le Carre’s spy novel “The Little Drummer Girl.” “Lady Macbeth” star Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgard are also starring in the six-part series that follows an aspiring actress who is lured into the world of terrorists and espionage. Here’s the book synopsis:
READ MORE: ‘Waco’: Michael Shannon Shines In Otherwise Routine True Crime Drama [Review]
On holiday in Mykonos, Charlie wants only sunny days and a brief escape from England’s bourgeois dreariness. Then a handsome stranger lures the aspiring actress away from her pals—but his intentions are far from romantic. Joseph is an Israeli intelligence officer, and Charlie has been wooed to flush out the leader of a Palestinian terrorist group responsible for a string of deadly bombings. Still uncertain of her own allegiances, she debuts in the role of a lifetime as a double agent in the “theatre of the real.”
Shannon will take the role of Kurtz, an Israeli spymaster, and it’s a part that was previously played by Klaus Kinski in George Roy Hill‘s 1984 feature film adaptation of the book.
No word yet when production will begin, but presumably it’ll have to wait for Skarsgard to wrap his duties on “Big Little Lies” season two which rolls this spring. BBC will air the series across the pond, and AMC bring it stateside, but it won’t be on your dial until 2019. [THR]