It feels like just yesterday we were reporting on Sarah Gadon joining the cast of J.J. Abrams and Hulu’s streaming adaptation of Stephen King’s JFK time-travel take 11/22/63. That might be because it was just yesterday. Today, though, brings word that Chris Cooper, Cherry Jones, Daniel Webber, George MacKay, Lucy Fry and Leon Rippy are also all part of the cast.
James Franco is starring as Jake Epping, a divorced English teacher who stumbles on a time portal than can send him back to late 1958, kicking off a quest to prevent the shooting of President John F. Kennedy while on a tour in Dallas in 1963, a mission complicated by his falling in love and the tricky, resolute nature of time, which keeps springing back into shape.
Gadon is Sade, the plucky librarian Jake falls for. Cooper will be Al Templeton, the owner of Al’s Diner and a mentor to Jake who spurs his mission in the first place. Webber has another key role in Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who was identified by the killer and became one of the most infamous people in American history. Jones is playing Oswald’s mother, with Lucy Fry as his Russian wife, MacKay playing a good-natured bartender who befriends Jake and Rippy as Harry Dunning, a kind but damaged janitor at Jake’s school in 2015 that the teacher encounters as a youngster during his traumatic childhood in the late 1950s and ‘60s.
J.J. Abrams is producing the drama, which has Black Sea’s Kevin Macdonald on board to direct the first two episodes of a nine-part miniseries from Bridget Carpenter’s script.