Diane Keaton’s recent filmography exposes how wildly underused and typecast the iconic actress has been in the last decade. A trip to her IMDB page, for example, shows a series of three consecutive forgettable comedies — Smother, Mama’s Boy and Because I Said So —all from 2007, all featuring Keaton as a “smothering” or “meddling” mother. So today’s news of Keaton being cast in The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino’s upcoming TV series The Young Pope is very good news for anyone who’s wanted to see Keaton get the types of roles she deserves.
The show, which is being produced by Canal Plus, HBO and Sky, will be Keaton’s first ever gig as a TV series regular — and it’s starting immediately: production begins this week.
It was previously reported that Jude Law would play the central character of Pontificate of Pius XIII aka Lenny Belardo — a fictional American Pope. Keaton is playing Sister Mary, a nun (also American) residing in the Vatican.
Sorrentino is directing all of the episodes, which take place in the Vatican, the U.S. and Africa. Here’s the director/series creator’s rather grandiose description of everything The Young Pope tries to cover:
The clear signs of God’s existence. The clear signs of God’s absence. How faith can be searched for and lost. The greatness of holiness, so great as to be unbearable when you are fighting temptations and when all you can do is to yield to them. The inner struggle between the huge responsibility of the Head of the Catholic Church and the miseries of the simple man that fate (or the Holy Spirit) chose as Pontiff. Finally, how to handle and manipulate power in a state whose dogma and moral imperative is the renunciation of power and selfless love towards one’s neighbour. That is what The Young Pope is about.
You know, like Smother.