'The Son': Jake Gyllenhaal To Star In HBO Limited Series Directed By Denis Villeneuve
About a month ago, word came out that director Denis Villeneuve (the upcoming Dune) was going to reunite with his two-time collaborator Jake Gyllenhaal (Prisoners, Enemy) on a mystery project. Now we know what that project is: an HBO limited series called The Son, based on Norwegian author Jo Nesbø's book of the same name. Get the details below.
HBO has given a series order to The Son, a limited series that will star and be executive produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. Villeneuve is set to direct and executive produce, while writer Lenore Zion (Billions, Channel Zero, Ray Donovan) will showrun and executive produce. Nesbø is on board as an executive producer, while Kilter Films' Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who are behind HBO's Westworld, will executive produce as well, adding to the overall pedigree of this limited series.
The book is described as "a tale of vengeance set amid Oslo's brutal hierarchy of corruption," but that's pretty vague. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:
Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny's been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don't know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit—or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he's serving time for other peoples' crimes.
Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest—all of them focused on keeping him high and in jail. And all of them under the thumb of the Twin, Oslo's crime overlord. As long as Sonny gets his dope, he's happy to play the criminal and the prison's in-house savior.
But when he learns a stunning, long-hidden secret concerning his father, he makes a brilliantly executed escape from prison—and from the person he'd let himself become—and begins hunting down those responsible for the crimes against him...The darkly looming question is: Who will get to him first—the criminals or the cops?
Jake Gyllenhaal starring in a prison break drama directed by Denis Villeneuve? Hell yes. I would like to see this immediately, please. Some people may be a bit hesitant, since the last high-profile adaptation of Nesbø's work was the disastrous film version of The Snowman (best known for the memes based on its ridiculous poster), but after that notorious whiff, things can only get better...right?