Apple TV+’s Foundation series has added Lee Pace and Jared Harris in lead roles, Variety reports. Pace is known for playing Ronan the Accuser in Marvel Studios films Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel. Jared Harris is known for playing Anderson Dawes on The Expanse and Valery Legasov in HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries. Foundation is based on Isaac Asimov’s Hugo Award-winning Foundation series of sci-fi novels. The series will follow a group of exiles who come to believe that the only way to save their Galactic Empire is to stand against it. Harris will play mathematical genius Hari Seldon, who predicts the fall of the Empire. Pace is going to play the reigning Emperor of the Galaxy, Brother Day.
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Pace’s previous television work includes starring roles on AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire and ABC’s Pushing Daisies. His most recent film was Driven, which closed out this year’s Venice Film Festival. He’s also known to fans of Middle-earth for his role in The Hobbit film trilogy.
Harris has been twice nominated for an Emmy Award, once for Mad Men and once for Chernobyl. He’s also appeared in Carnival Row, The Terror, The Crown, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Lincoln, and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. His next film is Morbius, a part of Sony’s Marvel-adjacent Spider-Man universe.
David S. Goyer is the showrunner and executive producer of Foundation, from studio Skydance. Josh Friedman, Robyn Asimov, and Skydance Television’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross are also executive producing.
The original Foundation trilogy was first published as eight short stories in Astounding Magazine from 1942 to 1950. They first began appearing as fixup novels in 1951, with the publication of Foundation, made up of the first four short stories. The other four were split between 1952’s Foundation and Empire and 1953’s Second Foundation. Asimov returned to the world of Foundation in 1982 with the novel Foundation’s Edge. He followed that in 1986 with the sequel Foundation and Earth, and then the prequels Prelude to Foundation in 1988 and Forward the Foundation in 1993. These prequels connected Foundation Asimov’s other sci-fi universe, those of the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series.
Apple TV+ will launch on November 1st. It will cost $4.99 per month. Original shows coming to the new streaming television service include See, The Morning Show, Dickinson, For All Mankind, Helpsters, Snoopy in Space, Ghostwriter, The Elephant Queen, Servant, Truth Be Told, Little America, The Banker, and Hala.
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