If you thought last month’s casting of Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith was a sexy choice, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Everyone’s favorite smoldering short king, Oscar Isaac (recently seen playing the Handsomest Divorced Professor in the World in the Ingmar Bergman remake/extended knitwear commercial, Scenes From a Marriage, and sporting the greatest beard ever committed to celluloid in the David Lynch remake/extended sand commercial, Dune), is in discussions to play a pre-fame Kurt Vonnegut in the upcoming eight-episode crime thriller, Helltown.
Helltown centers on Kurt Vonnegut (Isaac) before he was a renowned author and cultural lightning rod. In 1969 Kurt was a struggling novelist and car salesman living life with his wife and five children on Cape Cod. When two women disappear and are later discovered murdered underneath the sand dunes on the outskirts of Provincetown, Kurt becomes obsessed and embroiled in the chilling hunt for a serial killer and forms a dangerous bond with the prime suspect.
Based on Casey Sherman 2022 book of the same name, the series will be shown showrun (is that a verb? I don’t care.) by Mohamad El Masri (Severance) and produced by All Quiet on the Western Front director Ed Berger.
If discussions go well, the Moon Knight star will join a proud fraternal order of extremely handsome men who played regular- or unfortunate-looking authors. Other members of the order include Jude Law, who played Thomas Wolfe in Genius; Joseph Fiennes, who played William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love; Javier Bardem, who played Ramón Sampedro in The Sea Inside; Matt Dillon, who played Charles Bukowski in Factotum; Tom Hiddleston, who played F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris; and, of course, Daniel Radcliffe, who played Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings.
I wouldn’t mind climbing into that cat’s cradle, amirite?
