The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos are star Colin Farrell are teaming up again – this time for the small screen, for an Amazon series about the Iran-Contra affair. Farrell will play the leading role of Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North in the as-yet-untitled series, Variety is reporting; the Amazon series will in fact mark the duo’s third collaboration, following the recently-completed The Killing of a Sacred Deer, co-starring Nicole Kidman, Bill Camp, and Alicia Silverstone. That film has already been picked up by A24 (which distributed The Lobster), presumably for a release later this year.
Deer, like Lobster before it, was a project originated by Lanthimos (and his regular writing partner Efthimis Filippou, who also co-wrote Dogtooth and Alps). But these days, he’s been working as a hired gun; he’s currently directing The Favourite, a period royals drama written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (starring Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, and Farrell’s Lobster co-star Rachel Weisz), and the Amazon series will be penned by Enzo Mileti and Scott Wilson.
Ben Stiller and his Red Hour Films partner Nicky Weinstock will executive-produce the series, which will primarily focus on North’s role in the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for hostages in Lebanon, with the proceeds from those sales diverted to Contra groups in Nicaragua. All of this was super-illegal, and though North was indicted on sixteen felony counts, his three convictions were eventually dismissed and he spent no time in jail. After a failed 1994 run for the Senate in Virginia (a campaign immortalized in the documentary A Perfect Candidate), he became another asshole on right-wing talk radio and Fox News.
The North series is the latest high-profile get for Amazon, which put out an original Woody Allen series last year and has shows currently in production with Matthew Weiner and David O. Russell, among others.