Jamie Bell has signed on to play "a mysterious loner" named Harper in Shining Girls, the Apple TV+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes' best-selling novel (buy a copy HERE). Bell joins the previously announced Elisabeth Moss and Wagner Moura in the cast.
Created and written by Silka Luisa, Shining Girls is about
a Depression-era drifter who must murder the “shining girls” in order to continue his travels.
The description of Beukes' novel gives away the fact that Bell's Harper is the drifter who's out to kill "shining girls":
In Depression-era Chicago, a drifter named Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women who burn with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back.
Moss is playing Kirby, "a Chicago reporter who survived a brutal assault only to find her reality shifting as she hunts down her attacker". Moura's character is Dan, "a veteran journalist breaking the widening story of a copycat attack".
Moss and her Love & Squalor Pictures partner Lindsey McManus are executive producing the series with Luisa, Beukes, Alan Page Arriaga, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davidson of Appian Way.
Shining Girls is going to give us the chance to watch Elisabeth Moss try to stop a time traveling serial killer, and that makes it a must-see as far as I'm concerned.