Best known for being Peter Parker's "guy in the chair" best friend Ned in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far from Home, and the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home (with appearances in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame along the way), Jacob Batalon has signed on to take the title role in the Syfy series Reginald the Vampire, which is based on author Johnny B. Truant's Fat Vampire series of novels.
Syfy has ordered 10 episodes of the show, which is described as an "hourlong dramedy". The series will center on
an unlikely hero, Reginald Baskin (Batalon) who tumbles headlong into a world populated by beautiful, fit and vain vampires as an unlikely hero who will have to navigate every kind of obstacle — the girl he loves but can’t be with, a bully manager at work and the vampire chieftain who wants him dead. Fortunately, Reginald discovers he has a few unrecognized powers of his own.
The series is coming to us from Great Pacific Media and Modern Story Company. Harley Peyton, fresh off the Chucky series, will write, executive produce, and serve as showrunner on Reginald the Vampire. Jeremiah Chechik will executive produce and direct. Todd Berger and Lindsay Macadam are also on board as executive producers, with Julie DeCresce as co-executive producer.
The Fat Vampire series currently consists of six novels: Fat Vampire, Tastes Like Chicken, All You Can Eat, Harder Better Fatter Stronger, Fatpocalypse, and Survival of the Fattest. (Get them on Kindle HERE.) There was also a three-book spin-off about The Vampire Maurice. Here's the description of the first Fat Vampire book:
When overweight treadmill salesman Reginald Baskin finally meets a co-worker who doesn't make fun of him, it's just his own bad luck that tech guy Maurice turns out to be a two thousand-year-old vampire.
And when Maurice turns Reginald to save his life, it's just Reginald's own further bad luck that he wakes up to discover he's become the slowest, weakest, most out-of-shape vampire ever born, doomed to "heal" to his corpulent self for all of eternity.
As Reginald struggles with the downsides of being a fat vampire — too slow to catch people to feed on, mocked by those he tries to glamour, assaulted by his intended prey and left for undead — he discovers in himself rare powers that few vampires have… and just in time too, because the Vampire Council might just want his head for being an inferior representative of their race.
Fat Vampire is the story of an unlikely hero who, after having an imperfect eternity shoved into his grease-stained hands, must learn to turn the afterlife's lemons into tasty lemon danishes.
I haven't read any of Truant's work, but I have enjoyed Batalon's performances as Ned, so I would gladly watch him play a bloodsucker on a TV show.