Apple has announced two new cast members who’ll be joining its adaptation of Hugh Howey’s post-apocalyptic novel Wool: The Midnight Sky/Selma‘s David Oyelowo and Parks and Recreation‘s Rashida Jones. They will join a couple of previously-announced stars: Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Robbins.
Apple revealed that it was adapting Howey’s novel earlier this year, and that Ferguson will not only act in the series, but will serve as an executive producer. The project is to be written by Graham Yost (Band of Brothers, Justified), while Morten Tyldum (Defending Jacob, Passengers, The Imitation Game) has been tapped to direct the series.
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Wool
Howey’s novel was a self-published hit when it debuted in 2011, and kicks off his Silo series—Wool is followed by two other installments, Shift and Dust, as well as a couple of short stories that appeared in John Joseph Adams’ Apocalypse Triptych anthologies. Last month, Howey announced that he had begun writing a fourth installment in the series.
The books are set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which the remnants of humanity exist in an underground city called the Silo, which extends for hundreds of stories beneath the ground. The citizens of the Silo aren’t allowed aboveground, having been told that it’s a toxic wasteland. Oyelowo will play Sheriff Holston, who’s responsible for keeping order in the Silo. Jones will play his wife Allison who works in the Silo’s IT department, which maintains the city’s external sensors; Robbins will play Bernard, the head of the department. Allison believes that the world is actually habitable and vanishes, prompting Holston to eventually follow her. Ferguson will play Juliette, who steps into the role of Sheriff.
An adaptation of the books have been in the works for years. Howey was able to take his self-published novel to Simon & Schuster in 2012, and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions won the rights to adapt it as a film for 20th Century Fox, which would have debuted in 2012. That project fell apart, and it eventually moved over to AMC for a series, and that version seems to have transferred itself over to Apple for Apple TV+.
Apple has been growing its original content library in recent years: In addition to Ted Lasso and genre projects like Amazing Stories, See, and For All Mankind, it’s set to debut an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation on September 24th, and has Invasion, an adaptation of Lauren Beuke’s The Shining Girls, World War II drama Masters of the Air, and a bunch more in the works.
