Mahershala Ali will star in the third season of HBO’s True Detective while Kevin Bacon will reprise the role of Valentine McKee in the TV reboot of the 1990 film, Tremors.
TVTime
Mahershala Ali, Paul Bettany and Kevin Bacon are heading to the small screen.
In the last few years, particularly in the age of Netflix, Amazon and cable giving networks a run for their money, television has become the go-to place for prestigious movie stars.
From Matthew McConaughey to Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Anthony Hopkins, John Travolta, Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Paul Giamatti, Thandie Newton and Orlando Bloom, pretty much everyone’s got a TV project in the pipeline.
Paul Paul Bettany, who is most widely known for voicing Iron Man’s A.I. ‘Jarvis’ and the character of Vision in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe films, will essay ‘unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski in a limited series by Discovery slated to appear next month.
A case in point is Mahershala Ali, who won an Academy Award in 2017 and has starred in TV productions like House of Cards in the past. According to multiple reports, Ali has signed on to star in the upcoming third season of HBO’s crime anthology series, True Detective. While the first season of the series picked up award nominations and universal praise, the second season was universally panned. It remains to be seen what creator Nic Pizzolatto comes up with.
Another TV entrant this year is actor Paul Bettany, who is most widely known for voicing Iron Man’s highly advanced computerized A.I. ‘Jarvis’ as well as the character of Vision in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe films. Unlike Ali, Bettany has never starred in a role on the small screen and is about to change that fact next month.
In Discovery’s limited series, Manhunt, scheduled to arrive in September, Bettany will essay ‘unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski. According to Vanity Fair, the series is a true-crime drama that “traces the F.B.I. hunt for one of America’s most reclusive and elusive domestic terrorists”.
Speaking about the role, the actor noted, “I had this image of him as that crazy, dirty hermit being pulled out of the woods. . . . And then I started reading about him. A boy who was jumped two grades ahead during puberty, goes to Harvard at 16 years old, is experimented on, and ends up getting, one could argue, weaponized. . . . One can have empathy for that child and what happened to make this man so furious and the most alone of lonely people.”
The third and final person on our list, who is gearing up to make his mark on TV is Kevin Bacon. It won’t be his first time either having starred in TV productions like The Following and I Love Dick in recent history.
Bacon will star in SyFy’s TV reboot of the 1990 film, Tremors. Bacon starred in the original film so his return in the TV reboot seems apt. Though Bacon will reprise the role of Valentine McKee, the TV series will pick up 25 years after the events of the film.