André Holland to star in Stephen King Hulu series Castle Rock

If the mysterious teaser for Hulu’s Castle Rock intrigued you, here’s another reason to be excited: Moonlight actor André Holland has joined the cast.

Back in February, Bad Robot and Stephen King tweeted links to a cryptic trailer on YouTube. In the clip, character and location names from King’s work (Annie Wilkes, Shawshank State Prison) appear in text, while audio snippets from various King film adaptations play. It ends with the words Castle Rock displayed in red across a map of the northeastern United States.

Three months later, we know little about Castle Rock other than that it’s a 10-episode series from Hulu and it somehow ties together multiple Stephen King stories. But on Thursday, a bit of news surfaced that boosted our interest in a major way: André Holland will star.

Holland recently enjoyed breakout success with Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning Moonlight, in which he played the love interest of Trevante Rhodes’s protagonist Chiron. Castle Rock won’t be his first small-screen venture, though. The Alabama-born actor, also a veteran of theatre, drew critical praise as Dr. Algernon Edwards on Steven Soderbergh’s Cinemax drama, The Knick, and appeared in the latest iteration of Ryan Murphy’s horror anthology series, American Horror Story.

Despite his relatively short resume, Holland has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most fascinating actors. Armed with a steady gaze that comes across as simultaneously calculated and mercurial, he seems equally capable of playing a heartthrob and a super-villain. (Hannibal really missed the boat when it didn’t cast him as the titular serial killer.) Even when he’s perfectly still, you can’t take your eyes off him.

So, we’re delighted that he appears to have finally nabbed a lead role. In Castle Rock, he plays Henry, an attorney who has “a unique and complicated history in Castle Rock, Maine”. Holland also has supporting roles in Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time and Steve McQueen’s Widows, both of which are scheduled for release in 2018.

Hulu’s official synopsis for Castle Rock describes it as “a psychological horror series set in the Stephen King multiverse” that combines the author’s oeuvre in “an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.” The title refers to a fictional town featured in several of King’s stories, including Cujo and “The Body”.

J.J. Abrams serves as executive producer alongside Ben Stephenson, Liz Glotzer, Sam Shaw, and Dustin Thomason. He previously produced a miniseries adaptation of King’s 11.22.63 for Hulu.

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