Monday greetings to you! Here's a roundup of the latest crime drama news to start off your week:
MOVIES
Castle alum Stana Katic, Sarah Megan Thomas, and Radhika Apte are set to star in an untitled female-driven WW II spy drama based on the real-life spies in Winston Churchill’s "secret army." The film centers on British intelligence officer Vera Atkins (Katic) and two of the women she sends to France as spies, Virginia Hall (Thomas) and Noor Inayat Khan (Apte). Atkins is a crafty recruiter with a secret of her own; Hall is a daring American with a wooden leg who was the first female field agent and ultimately the spy the Nazi’s dubbed "the most dangerous of all"; and Khan is a pacifist of Indian descent who was the first female wireless operator. These civilian women form a sisterhood while entangled in missions to turn the tide of the war. Thomas wrote the screenplay and will produce with Lydia Dean Pilcher (Queen of Katwe) who is set to direct.
Following the success of director David Leitch’s 2017 action-thriller Atomic Blonde, about an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent, star Charlize Theron has confirmed that plans are moving forward on a sequel. An adaptation of the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart, the film was praised for the performances of Theron, James McAvoy and John Goodman, and for its action sequences, and earned more than $98 million worldwide.
Jaime King has been cast as the female lead in Cutman, the indie drama starring Ray Liotta that comes from producer-director Michael Mailer. The script, written by Tiffany Heath, follows a retired boxer who is dying of cancer and working as an enforcer for low-level mobsters who just wants to die in peace before he meets a junkie and her daughter as they all search for meaning and revenge. King will play the junkie Josie, who uses her combination of feminine wiles and fierce will to complete a dark mission.
Riverdale star K.J. Apa has been tapped to replace YouTube phenom Kian Lawley in Fox 2000’s drama The Hate U Give after Lawley was dropped due to videos of him making racist remarks. George Tillman Jr. is directing the adaptation of the Angie Thomas novel, which stars Amandla Stenberg as a teen who witnesses a police officer kill her best friend and undergoes a political awakening.
Jim Carrey makes his return to the big screen in the new thriller Dark Crime from director Alexandros Avranas, as seen in a new trailer. The film, based on the 2008 New Yorker article "True Crime" by David Grann about real-life murderer Krystian Bala, follows Tadek (Carrey) as a Polish detective who becomes obsessed with solving a grisly murder and finds similarities between the murder and a crime in a book by famous author Krystov Kozlow (played by Marton Csokas). His journey down the rabbit hole eventually leads him to uncover a tangled web of lies and corruption. Dark Crimes is The film is set to hit Direct-TV April 19 and opens in theaters May 18.
The first trailer has landed for the well-received Sundance crime thriller American Animals from director Bart Layton. Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters and Blake Jenner star in the genre-bending movie that's based on the true story of four teenagers in Lexington, Kentucky, who tried to strike it rich by pulling of a $10M heist centered on a library.
A new trailer was released for Ocean’s 8, the female-driven offshoot from the mega-successful 2000s film series that itself was spawned from the 1960 Rat Pack picture. The heist yarn stars Sandra Bullock as convicted felon Debbie Ocean, along with Cate Blanchett and their merry sisterhood of thieves including Anne Hathaway, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Jaime King and Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. Anne Hathway plays their self-absorbed mark.
TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES
NCIS star and executive producer Mark Harmon has signed a new agreement to continue on the CBS Studios series. With him on board, the long-running crime procedural drama has been renewed for the 2018-2019 broadcast season for its sixteenth year. According to Forbes, Harmon earned $19 million from NCIS in 2017, which makes him the seventh highest-paid actor on TV, behind only Sofia Vergara and the principal cast of The Big Bang Theory. NCIS has been the most-watched scripted drama series on television since 2009 and is the most-watched show worldwide. Season 16 will be NCIS' first without star Pauley Perrette, who announced she would leaving at the end of Season 15, leaving Harmon and David McCallum as the only remaining original cast members.
ITV announced that Grantchester, based on the novels by James Runcie and starring James Norton and Robson Green, will return for a fourth series. However, it will be James Norton’s final episodes as character Sidney Chambers, the charismatic, jazz-loving clergyman, and one half of the unlikely crime-fighting duo based in 1950s Grantchester. Casting of the new vicar arriving in the hamlet of Grantchester will be announced shortly, ITV has said. Along with Robson Green, who plays Detective Geordie Keating, returning members of Grantchester’s ensemble cast include Al Weaver, Tessa Peake-Jones and Kacey Ainsworth.
USA Network has ordered four hourlong scripted pilots, including Treadstone, an action-packed drama that delves into the CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone from Universal Pictures’ Bourne film franchise; Erase, a crime thriller-with-a-twist starring Denis Leary as a dirty ex-cop who decides to do the right thing and bring down his complicit superior officers until his best weapon in this battle – a photographic memory – is suddenly compromised by symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s; Briarpatch, based on the Ross Tom novel about a dogged investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered by a car bomb; and Dare Me, a drama based on Megan Abbott’s book set within the cutthroat world of competitive high school cheerleading.
HBO Documentary Films has acquired the rights to journalist Michelle McNamara’s bestselling true-crime book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, to develop as a docuseries. The project is a meticulous exploration of the case of an elusive, violent predator who terrorized California in the late 1970s and early '80s. McNamara, the late wife of Patton Oswalt, was in the midst of writing the book when she unexpectedly died in her sleep in 2016, leaving the book to be completed by McNamara’s lead researcher Paul Haynes and a close colleague, Billy Jenkin
Sacha Baron Cohen is set to headline the six-episode limited series The Spy, which will debut globally on Netflix (outside of France), and on OCS in France. Written and directed by Gideon Raff, creator of the Israeli drama Prisoners of War on which Showtime’s Homeland was based, The Spy tells the story of legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen (Baron Cohen), who lived in Damascus undercover in the beginning of the 60s, spying for Israel. He managed to embed himself into Syrian high society and rise through the ranks of their politics until he was uncovered by the Syrian regime, sentenced to death, and publicly hanged in a Damascus square in 1965.
Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, who recurred as powerful studio head Sam Winslow in Season 5 of Showtime's Ray Donovan, will reprise her role in Season 6 as a series regular. Production begins this month in New York on the show’s sixth season, which is slated for a fall premiere. The series, starring Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, has relocated from Los Angeles to NYC for Season 6, following an emotional fifth season that culminated with Winslow (Sarandon) as one of Ray’s (Schreiber) last-standing clients, after the death of a young star left his career in jeopardy.
Michael McGrady, known his recurring role of Frank Barnes on Ray Donovan, has joined the cast of NBC’s hit series Chicago P.D. as a recurring character for the remainder of Season 5. McGrady will play Assistant State’s Attorney James Osha, a prosecutor described as formidable, ambitious, and intelligent. He’ll play a crucial role in the battle between Voight (Jason Beghe) and Woods (guest star Mykelti Williamson) that has waged on throughout this season.
Oxygen Media is further expanding its true-crime slate, adding ten new original series including Serial Killer with Piers Morgan that will feature Morgan going into some of the most dangerous maximum security prisons in the United States to explore the minds of three of America’s most depraved serial killers. Other series include In Defense Of, which explores the complex relationships between notorious criminals, including Timothy McVeigh and Jodi Arias, and the defense attorneys who represented them in court; and License to Kill featuring renowned plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow as he investigates cases of murderous doctors and nurses. For all of the upcoming shows, head on over to the full Deadline report.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO
Two Crime Writers and Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste talk about all things Will Self and the dreaded "Death of the Novel," the difficulty of banning books, and much more in their latest podcast. Special guest Sarah Hilary talked about winning the Theakstons award with her debut novel, how she came to be a writer, and other inspiring info.
The latest Writer Types podcast Crime Quiz returned, this time live from Anne's Book Carnival in Orange County, with panelists Sue Ann Jaffarian, Rochelle Staab and Tyler Dilts.
Read or Dead hosts Katie and Rincey featured book news (including a new Tana French novel) in their latest podcast and discussed the trope of the unreliable, often female, narrator.
THEATER
Rebus, the abrasive, hard-drinking and brilliant Edinburgh detective created by Ian Rankin, is to be the star of a new stage play after Rankin's collaboration with the playwright Rona Munro. The production will feature a new crime story to be solved by the dour detective, the protagonist of 24 books that have sold more than 30 million copies across the world, who is now retired and working on cold cases. Rebus has twice been portrayed on television, by John Hannah and Ken Stott. Rebus: Long Shadows will premiere at the Birmingham Repertory theatre in September, directed by the Rep’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert. It is expected to tour the UK afterwards, including Rebus’s Edinburgh stomping ground. The actor Charles Lawson, best known as Jim McDonald in Coronation Street, will star in the title role.