"HOLLYWOOD" CAST PICS
Lights. Camera. Glamour. Netflix’s latest series about early days in La La Land, Hollywood aims to show us a beautiful, blossoming Tinsel town and what might have been. Coming off of their work together on 2018’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Ryan Murphy told Darren Criss that he wanted his next project to be a “young, hopeful period piece
Murphy talked over dinner about a very famous gas station in Hollywood where sex workers mingled with celebrities. The naive seducers weren't allowed in the game because they were seen as tainted goods.Murphy merged both of those ideas, and began a lovingly constructed look at how they wished Hollywood would have operated back then; a world where women and gay people and people of color could flourish. How different would the world be if that had happened?
From the press release:
A new limited series from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, Hollywood follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost. Each character offers a unique glimpse behind the gilded curtain of Hollywood's Golden Age, spotlighting the unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day. Provocative and incisive, Hollywood exposes and examines decades-old power dynamics, and what the entertainment landscape might look like if they had been dismantled.
In the trailer below Jim Parsons (The Big Bang, The Muppets) looks absolutely terrifying as Henry Willson, a real-life villain. According to Murphy Wilson was a true sexual predator and an alcoholic who would take these young men who were vulnerable and from bad homes, who came to Hollywood, then sexually abuse them. uite frankly, I am just not used used to seeing Jim as a villain, however, Hollywood wants you to understand why a character like Henry Willson is doing what he is doing. Especially in Hollywood, nobody just becomes a monster- monsters are made.
Writing a delicious villain is my greatest joy and the thing I do the best. And once Jim signed on, it was such an odd but absolutely perfect casting choice. When I first saw the dailies, I was stunned. He's the only person I could ever picture in that role now.
- Ian Brennan