Given their shared artistic obsessions—rich people; fancy clothes; sudden, shocking swerves into the grotesque and fatal—it’s kind of surprising that TV mastermind Ryan Murphy and novelist Bret Easton Ellis have never worked together before. That’s all about to change now, though, as FX has officially given a green light to Murphy’s adaptation of 2023 Ellis novel The Shards.
Originally published serially in podcast/audiobook form, the novel is ostensibly autobiographical, with Ellis recounting his senior year in high school—which, wouldn’t you know it, turns out to have been just filled with the kinds of details you might expect to crop up in a Bret Easton Ellis novel, including rampant sexual manipulations, pet mutilations and serial killers, and a focus on meta-textual tricks and turns. An adaptation of the series, produced by Murphy’s gargantuan TV-spewing machine, was announced back in May. Now, FX has confirmed it’ll be giving the series—previously developed at HBO before the whole thing blew up, prompting Ellis, at the time, to say “never again” to trying to adapt the book—a home.
That includes casting, with 25-year-old Mike Flanagan horror vet Igby Rigney taking on the lead role as Ellis himself. Newcomer Homer Gere, meanwhile—who, we’re sure, has many appealing and fascinating traits in addition to the fact that Richard Gere is his dad—will star as Robert Mallory, a new student whose presence upsets the social order of Ellis’ high-class prep school, and who may, or may not, also be that pet-mutilating serial killer we mentioned above. Graham Campbell and the previously announced Kaia Gerber are also set to star.
The Murphy TV Machine is, of course, going strong as ever. (There aren’t a lot of producers who can take the news that one of their (multiple) network shows is basically getting put out to pasture with nothing more than a mild shrug and an acknowledgement that there’ll likely be another on the way in a minute.) Just on FX, his currently active (or hypothetically active, when he feels like making another season) shows include American Horror, Crime, and Sports Story, Feud, Grotesquerie, and the upcoming American Love Story. Ellis, meanwhile, is getting a bit of a resurgence of his own, largely predicated on continued interest in one of his most famous books; Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of American Psycho is currently in the works and drawing renewed attention.
[via Deadline]
