Period drama Downton Abbey may have made Dan Stevens a household name back in the 2010s, but his career since playing Matthew Crawley has been a delightful mix of weirdo character pieces and entertaining Hollywood blockbuster roles, with some occasional offbeat voicework thrown on top. (He is the best part of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and we will not be taking questions at this time.) Stevens has a half-dozen projects currently in the works, ranging from another Godzilla movie to playing a serial killer on the most recent Dexter revival. But it’s his next role that feels strangely familiar — if only thanks to the disturbing nature of its setting.
Stevens will lead the new installment of AMC’s critically acclaimed horror franchise, The Terror. Subtitled Devil in Silver, the series will adapt Victor LaValle’s book of the same name and is something of a swerve from its predecessors in that it’s a contemporary story versus a period piece. (Season 1 followed a doomed 19th-century Arctic expedition, while season 2 was set in a Japanese internment camp in California during World War II.)
Stevens plays Pepper, a working-class man who is unjustly committed to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, an institution filled with the kinds of people society vastly prefers to forget. But something darker is hidden in one of the institution’s locked wards, and in order to escape, Pepper will have to confront both the monstrous entity that seems to feed on the suffering of others — and the demons inside himself.
One part horror thriller and one part furious takedown of the inequities inherent in America’s mental health system, LaValle’s novel wrestles with questions of faith, race, and class through familiar genre tropes. It’s also a fairly familiar position for Stevens to be in as an actor, who has found himself unwillingly snared in a mental institution once before.
Granted, FX’s critically acclaimed X-Men series, Legion, was a very different sort of story and David Haller was a very different sort of leading role. But its cadre of colorful patients, questions of reality and mental capacity, and threats of a constantly creeping evil seem fairly similar if a bit more supernaturally tinged than mutant-focused this time around. (Legion, by the way, is all-around excellent, and if you’ve never seen it before, please fix your life immediately.)
LaValle is serving as co-showrunner alongside Halt and Catch Fire’s Chris Cantwell, and the series’ stacked cast includes such familiar faces as Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Stephen Root, and Aasif Mandvi.
The Terror: Devil in Silver premieres on AMC+ and Shudder on May 7.
The post Dan Stevens in The Terror: Devil In Silver Has Serious Legion Vibes appeared first on Den of Geek.
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