Snowpiercer is coming to TV, with none other than Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame playing the lead role!
TNT announced Wednesday morning that the Tony-winning Hamilton star has been cast in the TV adaptation of Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 post-apocalyptic drama Snowpiercer.
Related: Lea Michele cast opposite Brandon Micheal Hall in Daveed Diggs’ comedy pilot
The movie, in turn based on a French graphic novel titled Le Transperceneige, takes place on a train moving through a world covered in snow and ice, aboard which are the last remaining members of the human race. It stars Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer and Ed Harris.
Daveed Diggs will play a character named Layton Well, “a prisoner barely surviving the harsh conditions in the tail end of the train. A quiet thinker who spends his days sniffing the industrial-waste-turned-drug Chronole and tending to his cage full of rats, Layton becomes a reluctant participant in a struggle that could upend life on the train,” via the press release.
While Diggs’ character has a different name from Evans’ in the movie, it sounds like they are essentially filling the same role in the story: both are members of the lowest class, fighting for social justice against the ‘first class’ elites. In the graphic novel, the lead character was called Proloff, but also fit this basic description.
As reported by EW, The Sarah Connor Chronicles‘ Josh Friedman is serving as showrunner, with Doctor Strange‘s Scott Derrickson directing the pilot and staying on board as executive producer. Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Tae-hun, and Dooho Choi are also executive producers.
How closely the TNT series will follow the movie and the graphic novel that preceded it remains to be seen. But with this casting news, we’re suddenly a lot more interested…