Hugh Grant is about to join Russell Crowe, Rip Torn, Sean Bean, Sir Laurence Olivier, and more in the not-that-exclusive fraternity of actors who have played the king of the Gods. He’ll don the toga for Netflix‘s Kaos, a series from Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World) that puts a “modern twist on Greek and Roman mythology, exploring themes of gender politics, power and life in the underworld.”
And he’s not the only one. He’s joined by a slew of actors, including Janet McTeer (Hera), Cliff Curtis (Poseidon), David Thewlis (Hades), Nabhaan Rizwan (Dionysus), and Aurora Perrineau, Killian Scott, Misia Butler, and Leila Farzad as mere mortals.
Grant will channel more than a little of his narcissistic Paddington 2 villain as a Zeus who plummets into paranoia after finding his first wrinkle. With Mount Olympus apparently a Botox-free zone, he goes into crisis mode. Meanwhile, Poseidon is into megayachts, Hades is terrible at managing the underworld, Dionysus is out of control, and Hera has to slap her forehead through all of it. That’s a strangely staid dynamic for a show that purports to bend the known myths. Beyond updating it into modern territory, it seems strange that they wouldn’t futz around at least a little bit with the gender dynamics that Classics 101 teachers drilled into students. This is a fun cast, but how the myths are actually being twisted remains to be seen.
(via Deadline)