The cast of FX’s upcoming Kindred pilot has expanded to include True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten, Tony Award nominee Micah Stock, Perry Mason‘s Gayle Rankin, and Austin Smith – an original Broadway cast member of Hamilton. Godfather of Harlem‘s Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and David Alexander Kaplan, an 11-year-old actor who’s appeared in The Resident and MacGyver, have also been cast in Kindred.
The newcomers joins previously announced series star Mallori Johnson as regulars on Kindred, which is based on the critically acclaimed novel by Octavia E. Butler. Janicza Bravo (Zola) is on board to direct the pilot from a script by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen). Jacobs-Jenkins, Bravo, Courtney Lee-Mitchell, Darren Aronofsky, and Ari Handel of Protozoa Pictures are executive producing. Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields, Ernestine Walker, and Merrilee Heifetz also executive, with FX Productions producing the pilot.
“Since my first encounter with the novel nearly two decades ago, there have been few, if any, books and even fewer authors who have meant as much to me as Kindred and Octavia Butler,” said Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in March 2021 when the adaptation was announced. “It has been the highlight and honor of my career thus far to try and finally bring this timeless story to life – and especially at FX, whose catalogue of bold, thought-provoking, and cutting-edge television has been an endless source of inspiration and delight.”
“The Octavia E. Butler Estate was thrilled and grateful to have placed Kindred with Courtney Lee Mitchell at the outset, who brought it to Branden Jacobs Jenkins (a young writer who shares with Octavia the rare honor of being a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award recipient) and then to the terrific people at Protozoa,” stated the Octavia E. Butler Estate. “FX could not be a better or more enthusiastic partner, as evidenced by the brilliant creative team they are building, and the legendary slate of shows they have produced. We can’t wait to see this beloved work take its place among the stars in the FX universe.”
FX released the following description of the plot:
“FX’s adaptation of Kindred is centered on Dana, a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has uprooted her life of familial obligation and relocated to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own. But, before she can get settled into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a nineteenth-century plantation with which she and her family are most surprisingly and intimately linked.
An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.”
