American Gods fans, meet your Mr. Wednesday. Actor extraordinaire Ian McShane has been cast in in Bryan Fuller’s upcoming Starz show. After playing a slew of badasses in movies and shows like John Wick and Deadwood, Entertainment Weekly reports that McShane will be playing the mysterious figure Mr. Wednesday.
Fuller did not hide his excitement over the casting, tweeting “GODDAMN, WE GOT McSHANE! #WONDERFULWEDNESDAY”
American Gods is based on the award- winning Neil Gaiman book of the same name. The cult favorite’s plot centers around Shadow, a man fresh out of prison whose wife and best friend die in a car accident. Broken and alone, our hero meets Mr. Wednesday who somehow seems to know everything about Shadow’s past. Wednesday hires Shadow as his right hand man and reveals that ancient gods and deities are not mythological but walking among us mortals in present day. The 100 actor Ricky Whittle will be playing protagonist Shadow.
The premise sounds exactly like the kind of spectacularly strange fare Fuller is known for. He broke big with Showtime series Dead Like Me. After two seasons, Fuller followed up with the critically acclaimed Pushing Daisies- a show about a man whose touch both brings the dead to life and brings the living to death, but like, more whimsical than it sounds. Fuller then reached his own American god status with the recently and dearly departed Hannibal, a show that pushed the network tv envelope so much it literally featured a main character being drugged and forced fed his sort- of- daughter’s disembodied ear, and it wasn’t even the most disturbing thing that had happened that season. Hannibal concluded last year to many fans’ bereavement. At least had one of the most romantic final scenes of a television series ever.
The impressive, delightfully macabre resume is paying off for the very busy Fuller, who will also helm a new Star Trek series for CBS (he’s had practice- Fuller wrote and produced the previous Star Trek Voyager series which ran 1995- 2001). If this isn’t enough, Fuller also will be working on a reboot of Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 anthology series Amazing Stories, Entertainment Weekly also reports.
This is all to say yes, you will have to get Starz now, and yes, you will have to be come a Trekkie.