A24 and Hulu’s new drama The Spot has had an, um, spot of trouble in recent months, with news breaking back in June that series star and executive producer Kate Winslet had bailed on the Ed Solomon-created show amidst a bout of that old killer, creative differences. (She was apparently unhappy with “how the project’s evolution has impacted the required approach to the role,” which is the kind of diplomatic phrasing that we’ll be mulling for a minute.) Now the series has apparently found a way for its heart to go on, casting Claire Danes in the role vacated by Winslet, and Ewan McGregor opposite her.
As previously reported, the series centers on a successful surgeon (Danes) and her husband (McGregor), who come to suspect that she might have been the culprit of a hit-and-run incident that killed a child. Which sounds pretty heavy, even for actors who are fresh off A Gentleman In Moscow (McGregor) and HBO Max’s Full Circle (Danes). The latter miniseries presumably explaining why Danes got the nod here, by the by: That series was executive produced and showrun by Solomon, who’s covered a very wide swathe of tones over the course of his career, from the Bill And Ted movies, through recent Steven Soderbergh collaborations like Full Circle.
Variety notes that, while Danes and McGregor—who came up as it-folk during roughly the same period of Hollywood success—have never officially worked together before, they did have at least one close call in the past: They were set to be the leads in at least one of the iterations of Flora Plum, the circus performer biopic that Jodie Foster spent the first several years of the new millennium trying to get made. That project ultimately fell apart, but here we are 20-plus years down the line, with the pair reunited, sans tightrope, at last.
