As you may have already heard, one of the latest “everything will eventually become a series version of whatever it formerly was” news stories has been the TV pilot adaptation of Bong Joon-Ho’s wild, anti-capitalist, sci-fi/fantasy action film, Snowpiercer. It was already announced that Hamilton actor Daveed Diggs (who you may have recently caught on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Black-ish, or The Get Down) would play the TNT pilot-and-potential series’ lead, and recently Jennifer Connelly also joined the project. Now, another newsworthy actor has been added to the cast who’ll appear within a train circling a snowy post-apocalyptic globe: The Americans MVP Alison Wright, who became known for playing that series’ oft-manipulated, deceived, displaced, but emotionally resilient Martha.
According to Deadline, in the wealth stratified train, Wright’s character resides in the fourth class cabin with her husband and daughter. Her name is Lilah Anderson, and she’s a “careful and quiet but…pragmatic and independent thinker” who works in a nail salon (also on the train — as is everything in the living world in the movie/series). Apparently she “doesn’t know how strong she is, but she’ll soon be forced to find out.”
Meanwhile, in case you missed the Connelly/Diggs news, Connelly is playing a first class passenger named Melanie Cavill, who’s a first class passenger and works as the Voice of the Train, heard announcing the goings on across the social status-confined worlds over an intercom. Diggs, meanwhile, plays the series’ reluctant hero, a futuristic-drug addicted man living in the impoverished back of the train. Since they’re already announcing cast-members who aren’t situated towards the back of the train, I wonder if the show will be structured differently than the film — showing the different worlds simultaneously, as opposed to as the rebellion pushes forward into the upper echelons. (Otherwise it’d presumably take a while for those characters to be introduced.) Only time will tell how this film with a pretty closed structure will be adapted into a potentially seasons-long series.