In the 1970s, preacher Jim Jones moved his congregation, the Peoples Temple, to Guyana, establishing the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project; the settlement resulted in tragedy after the shooting of a visiting U.S. congressman and the murder-suicide of over 900 members via poison. Even beyond Scorsese’s fictional pitch on The Studio, the Jonestown cult has been the subject of fascination for Hollywood. Vince Gilligan was reportedly developing an HBO Jonestown series way back in 2016. Leonardo DiCaprio was cast in a Jim Jones biopic in 2021, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was attached to play him in an entirely different film opposite Chloë Grace Moretz in 2022.
We don’t yet know what angle Bill Hader’s Jonestown project will take, but the budding television auteur is undeniably drawn to darker subject matter. In his acclaimed series Barry, he starred as a soldier-turned-hitman. One of his biggest post-SNL roles was playing the adult Richie in the Stephen King horror It Chapter Two. And he’ll next lend his voice to one of fiction’s most irredeemable maniacs, The Cat In The Hat. But Hader comes by the darkness honestly. He has a documented fascination with true crime and has spoken often about his love of Dateline, and Snapped, and Forensic Files. Will he bring his signature sense of humor to this latest dark subject matter? A real-life tragedy is harder to make funny, but we’ll see what Hader comes up with.
