Earlier today, The Hollywood Reporter announced that FX’s X-Men drama Legion, added another new actor. Jeremie Harris joins the cast as a charter named Ptonomy. He is described as, “an outsider by nature, stand-offish and sardonic, who is a former child prodigy who feels trapped in the past.”
The role seems perfect for Harris who is not only a Juilliard grad, but also a star of The Get Down, the 1970’s hip hop drama directed by Baz Luhrmann for Netflix.
Harris joins a cast that already includes Dan Stephens from Downton Abbey, Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Rec, Jean Smart and Rachel Keller from Fargo. Stephens is the lead as David Haller, a man who struggles with mental illness until a strange encounter makes him wonder if the voices he hears and the visions he sees are real. In the comics, Haller is the son of the mutant Charles Xavier/Professor X and Gabrielle Haller, an Israeli Holocaust survivor. There is no word on whether the show will follow the same storyline.
What we do know is that Legion is going to be different from what we’ve seen in terms of superheroes on TV. When speaking to Collider last year, producer Simon Kinberg said that Legion would have a different tone from the other Marvel properties.
“…The TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with Noah and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories.”
And Kinberg would know a little something about shaking up the superhero genre, he is also one of the producers of the extremely successful Deapool.
Production on Legion will begin in March. Noah Hawley is writing the pilot and will executive produce alongside Lauren Shuler Donner (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Wolverine), Bryan Singer (X-Men: Days of Future Past), Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Deadpool), and Marvel’s Jeph Loeb (Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil) and Jim Chory (Daredevil). John Cameron who previously worked with Hawley on Fargo will also be reunited with him on this project.