Work on The Continental is moving right along, with the series recently being revealed as a three-night event series. Now, character details have surfaced online thanks to a casting grid that has started making the rounds. As expected, the grid suggests the production is looking for a male around 31 years of age to play a character “posing as someone who he is not. Winston’s dark past will be revealed with his greatest strength, and weapon, becoming his mind.”
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Though The Continental was originally set up to be a present-day spinoff, the series is now being set in the 1970s to show fans the formation of the eponymous hotel, a safe haven for assassins within the John Wick world. For the role of Winston, casting agencies have been instructed to look for actors like Tom Pelphrey.
The grid also includes a casting description for Young Charon, a 17-year-old kid at the time that works for a new mob boss named Cormack in the series. Cormack is enemies with another new character named Frankie, a series regular who is Winston’s brother. It’s said Frankie is a Vietnam War veteran and ends up stealing something from Cormack in order to pay off a separate crime syndicate he’s in debt to.
Other characters include Yen (Frankie’s wife), Katherine Decker (a detective investigating The Continental), Mayhew (a cop who serves as Decker’s boss), and a handful of other supporting characters that will recur. Of note, one of those recurring characters is Uncle Charlie, apparently, a younger version of the character tasked with cleaning up crime scenes in the main John Wick films.
“We took a lot of pitches, and then the creative team from this obscure little show called Wayne that was on YouTube came to us with their take,” Lionsgate TV boss Kevin Beggs previously said of the series.
He added, “We were really blown away because it solved a bunch of problems and was super exciting, about a crumbling New York in the 1970s with a garbage strike that has piled up bags of garbage to the third floor of most brownstones, the mafia muscling in on that business which is why in The Sopranos he’s in the sanitation business, and other things that are really real as an interesting backdrop to explore the origins of The Continental which is famously within the movie franchise the assassin’s hotel in which you cannot kill anyone on the hotel grounds, but of course if you step one foot off you’re fair game, and that’s employed to great effect in many of the plots in the movies. Running all of that is Winston, who is played by Ian McShane.”
John Wick: Chapter 4 is currently set to enter theaters on May 27, 2022 while The Continental has yet to set a release date.
What other Wick spinoffs would you like to see? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter!
