Deadline is reporting that actor Jonathan Majors (Hostiles) has signed on for a lead role in Lovecraft Country, the upcoming HBO series from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, where he will star opposite Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Underground).
The drama is based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel and focuses on 25-year-old Atticus Black (Majors), who joins up with his friend Letitia (Smollett-Bell) and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America to find his missing father. This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback.
Lovecraft Country will reunite Majors with Yann Demange, who directed him in the upcoming drama White Boy Rick and is attached to direct the first episode, as well as executive producing the series with Pelle, Abrams, Ben Stephenson and David Knoller.
The drama received a straight-to-series order from HBO, and has been pitched as “an anthological horror series that reclaims genre storytelling from the African-American perspective.”
