Actor T.R. Knight, best known for his role as Dr. George O'Malley on 102 episodes of GREY'S ANATOMY, is set to play a "charismatic but controlling" rival to James Franco's lead character in the Bad Robot adaptation of Stephen King's novel 11/22/63.
Franco stars in the nine episode Hulu event series as
Jake Epping, a high school English teacher who travels back in time to try to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He finds his mission threatened by love, the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald, and the past itself, which does not want to be changed.
Knight will portray Johnny Clayton, the abusive estranged husband of the woman Epping falls for while in 1960s Texas. As you might imagine, this situation brings the two men into conflict, especially since Clayton is a bit unhinged.
Jonathan Demme was at one point attempting to turn 11/22/63 into a feature film, but finding a way to scale the 880 page tome down to a reasonable running time proved to be too daunting of a task, so Demme moved on. A mini-series seems to be the right way to go with this, and I'll be watching for sure. Put Stephen King's name on anything and it guarantees I'll be checking it out, but this project sounds especially interesting.
The adaptation was scripted by Bridget Carpenter, and the cast around Franco and Knight includes Sarah Gadon, Chris Cooper, Cherry Jones, Daniel Webber, George MacKay, Lucy Fry, and Leon Rippy.
11/22/63 is expected to premiere on Hulu sometime in 2016.
Sarah Gadon, the woman Franco and Knight will be fighting over