John Lithgow Joins Matthew Rhys & Tatiana Maslany On HBO’s ‘Perry Mason’ Series
John Lithgow will be joining the Matthew Rhys & Tatiana Maslany in HBO’s upcoming ‘Perry Mason’ limited series it has been announced.
Based on characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner, the new, reimagined series sees Rhys play the defence attorney/private investigator in 1932 Los Angeles. Whilst most of the country is recovering from the Great Depression, things in LA are booming, as the Olympics arrive and talking pictures start to take off.
Living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator, Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage. But when a child kidnapping goes very wrong, the case of the decade lands at Mason’s doorstep, and he relentlessly pursues the truth revealing a fractured city and just maybe, a pathway to redemption for himself.
Lithgow will play Elias Birchard “E.B.” Jonathan, a personal attorney at the nadir of his career and a semi-regular employer of private investigator, Perry Mason. A mentor and a father figure to Mason, E.B. is handed the kind of case he hasn’t seen in years: a high-profile parallel investigation to the LAPD involving a case of child kidnapping.
‘Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany plays Sister Alice, the leader of the Radiant Assembly of God, preaching three sermons a day to a hungry congregation and a radio audience that spans the country. Entertainer, politician, God’s conduit to the City of Angels, Sister Alice wields great power when she speaks, and plans to use it in ways only she can know.
John Lithgow has a multitude of shows under his belt from ‘3rd Rock from the Sun’, to ‘Dexter’, to his most recent outing as Winston Churchill in ‘The Crown’. He’s also popped up in films such as ‘Interstellar’, ‘Pitch Perfect 3’, ‘Dreamgirls’, and the recent version of Stephen King’s ‘Pet Sematary’.
The series comes from Robert Downey Jr’s Team Downey, and has been floating around as an idea for a number of years. Downey was originally looking at reviving the character for a feature film, then HBO got involved and it morphed into a tv project. It initially had ‘True Detective’ creator Nic Pizzolatto attached as writer, but he then left the project, so this iteration comes from Rolin Jones (‘Life in Pieces’, ‘Boardwalk Empire’, ‘Weeds’) and Ron Fitzgerald (‘Weeds’, ‘Westworld’) who will write, exec produce and serve as showrunners. Tim Van Patten, whose work includes the ‘Game of Thrones’ pilot along with episodes of ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Boardwalk Empire’, ‘Sex and the City’, ‘The Wire’, ‘The Pacific’, ‘Rome’ and ‘Deadwood’, is set to direct and exec produce.
As ‘Perry Mason‘ is a HBO series, that should mean it appears on Sky Atlantic when it is released. There is currently no premiere date, but we’ll let you know when we hear more.
