FX’s pilot of the profoundly influential novel Kindred has rounded out its cast with Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, Gayle Rankin, Austin Smith, Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and David Alexander Kaplan joining the previously announced Mallori Johnson as series regulars.
- Janicza Bravo, director and co-writer of the critically-acclaimed feature Zola, will direct the pilot with Johnson starring in the lead role.
- Kindred is based on MacArthur Fellow and Hugo Award winner Octavia E. Butler’s enormously popular and influential novel, which has been hailed as a visionary work of science fiction since it was first published more than four decades ago in 1979.
- The television pilot of this classic work, which sold over a million copies, was written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen, An Octoroon)
- The series will be executive produced by Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Darren Aronofsky (mother!, The Fountain) and Ari Handel (One Strange Rock, Noah) of Protozoa Pictures, Joe Weisberg (The Americans), Joel Fields (Fosse/Verdon, The Americans), Ernestine Walker, Merrilee Heifetz and Bravo.
- The pilot is being produced by FX Productions.
Novel Synopsis:
- “Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.”