Grey’s Anatomy co-star Jerrika Hinton, Sosie Bacon (Scream), Daniel Zovatto (Fear the Walking Dead) and Raymond Lee will co-star opposite Holly Hunter in Six Feet Under and True Blood creator Alan Ball’s new drama series for HBO.
Written by Ball, the yet-untitled series is described as a tragicomic meditation on the complicated forces at work on us all in America today. The show focuses on a contemporary multi-racial family and has now built a multi-racial cast. Philosophy professor Greg Bishop (not yet cast) and his lawyer wife Audrey Black (Hunter) are socially conscious idealists who decided to build a family by adopting children from Vietnam, Somalia and Colombia (Hinton, Zovatto, Lee) before having their own child in their 40s (Bacon). Then, one of the children begins to see things others cannot. Is it mental illness? Or something else?
Photo by: Gilles Toucas
Lee will play Duc, a successful life coach, adopted from Vietnam when he was five. A powerhouse and overachiever, he has ambitions to become a motivational guru on the scale of Tony Robbins; but his ambition masks a painful past that he has never really faced. Lee is repped by SDB Partners and Levity Entertainment Group.
Hinton plays Ashley, creator and owner of a retail fashion website, wife and mother of a four-year-old who was born in America to Somalian refugees, adopted when her mother died and her father was deported. Ashley now finds herself feeling part of neither the white or the black experience, and her perfect life is beginning to fray.
It is unclear how Hinton’s casting in the HBO series will impact her status on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, where she is a regular, playing surgical resident Stephanie Edwards. Last season, she also booked the female lead of the ABC pilot Toast while on Grey’s. Hinton started on Grey’s — now in its 13th season — as a recurring in Season 9 and was promoted to regular at the beginning of Season 10. She is repped by Greene & Associates, Myman Greenspan and Trademark Talent.
Zovatto plays Ramon, adopted from an orphanage in Colombia at eighteen months, now in his final year of college, studying video game design. Sensitive and appealing, his life is turned upside down when he begins to have hallucinations that cannot be explained. Zovatto, who has recurred on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, is repped by Luber Roklin Entertainment and Jackoway Tyerman.
Bacon plays Kristen, the only biological child of her parents, currently a junior in high school, she has always felt somehow lesser than her exotic international siblings. She’s determined to find something – anything – to define herself as something other than “just the pasty white chick” of the family.
This marks the first series regular role for Bacon, daughter of The Following star Kevin Bacon and The Closer leading lady Kyra Sedgwick. She is repped by The Kohner Agency. Impression Entertainment and Schreck Rose.
Ball executive produces the HBO series through his Your Face Goes Here, along with Peter Macdissi. The series falls under a new overall deal Ball signed with HBO last year.