The cast for Armando Iannucci's next planned TV comedy is coming together nicely. He's now hired Josh Gad as one of the leads for sci-fi series Avenue 5.
Iannucci has created and will oversee the series, which has a pilot set up at HBO, where he ran Veep for years. Avenue 5 is mostly set aboard the titular luxury space cruise liner, captained by Hugh Laurie's Ryan Clark. Others aboard include Rebecca Front as Karen Kelly, Suzy Nakamura as Iris Kimura and another recent addition, Silicon Valley's Zach Woods as Matt Spencer, the nihilistic nice guy head of Customer Relations.
Gad is on to play Herman Judd, the billionaire face and name behind Avenue 5 and the whole Judd brand, which includes hotels, fitness clubs and space tourism. Judd is used to a life of luxury. He made his money from holiday resorts and thinks he’s good at everything else. Terrible at science, he leaves that to the scientists he employs to give him the answers he wants. Aside from the scientists bit, this sounds like it could have some parallels with a certain current leader.
HBO has yet to specify when the show might air, and one assumes the pilot first has to pass muster. But given Iannucci's pedigree and talent, we're expecting this one to sail towards a series order before too long. As for Gad, he has a lot of movie voice roles headed our way, including A Dog's Journey, The Angry Birds Movie 2 (out 16 October here) and Frozen 2, which Disney will let go on 22 November. He'll be seen in Artemis Fowl, set for release on 9 August.
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