Yesterday, we heard that The Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Netflix series that draws inspiration from multiple stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, will star Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Carla Gugino (The Haunting of Hill House), Frank Langella (Masters of the Universe), Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica), and Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep). Now the names of twenty more cast members have been announced – and if you’ve been following Flanagan’s career, you’ll know that several of these actors have worked with him on previous projects, just like Gugino and Lumbly have. Variety reports Henry Thomas (The Haunting of Bly Manor), Kate Siegel (Hush), Samantha Sloyan (Grey’s Anatomy), Rahul Kohli (Midnight Mass), T’Nia Miller (Years and Years), Sauriyan Sapkota (The Midnight Club), Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights), Katie Parker (Absentia), Michael Trucco (How I Met Your Mother), Malcolm Goodwin (iZombie), Crystal Balint (A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting), Kyleigh Curran (Secrets of Sulphur Springs), Paola Nuñez (Bad Boys for Life), Aya Furukawa (The Cabin in the Woods), Matt Biedel (Narcos: Mexico), Daniel Jun (The Expanse), Ruth Codd (The Midnight Club), Robert Longstreet (Halloween Kills), Annabeth Gish (Before I Wake), and Igby Rigney (F9) are rounding out the cast.
Details on the characters played by the twenty new additions were not revealed. We also don’t know who Gugino is playing. We do know that
Mark Hamill will play “a character surprisingly at home in the shadows”; Frank Langella is Roderick Usher, “the towering patriarch of the Usher dynasty”; Mary McDonnell is Madeline Usher, Roderick’s twin sister; Carl Lumbly plays Poe’s investigator C. Auguste Dupin.
Here’s the set-up for Poe’s story The Fall of the House of Usher:
Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline are the only two surviving members of the aristocratic Usher family. For many years, they have lived together in the ancient mansion which is their ancestral family home. Madeline Usher has been ill for a long time and is not expected to live much longer. Partly due to his sister’s illness and partly, he believes, due to the negative influence of the old mansion in which he lives, Roderick Usher has fallen into a deep melancholy. To help recover his spirits, he summons his old friend, the story’s unnamed narrator, to come visit him.
Flanagan hasn’t named the other stories that are inspiring this series, but the C. Auguste Dupin character is from The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter.
Coming to us from Netflix and Flanagan’s production company Intrepid Pictures, The Fall of the House of Usher will consist of eight episodes. Flanagan will be directing four of those episodes, and the other four will be directed by Michael Fimognari, who was Flanagan’s cinematographer on Oculus, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and the Flanagan / Netflix shows The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass.
Flanagan and Fimognari are executive producing The Fall of the House of Usher with Trevor Macy and Emmy Grinwis.