Netflix’s Godless is looking at two highly in-demand actors to join Jack O’Connell in the limited series.
Both Jeff Daniels and Scoot McNairy are in talks with the streaming service to appear in the Western series, Deadline reports. Godless is being written, directed and executive produced by Scott Frank (The Lookout, Minority Report, Marley & Me). Steven Soderbergh and Casey Silver (The Forbidden Kingdom, Leatherheads, Hidalgo) will also executive produce.
Godless takes place in a Mexican mining town in the 1800s, and is still going through the process of casting. If Daniels and McNairy do sign onto the series they will join Jack O’Connell (’71, Unbroken, Starred Up), making it quite the high-profile limited series for Netflix. The series is aiming to film in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Frank and Soderbergh have worked together in the past with great success. Frank wrote his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight, which Soderbergh directed to critical acclaim. Though mainly known for his writing, Frank is also a talented and competent director. He directed his own scripts for the Liam Neeson thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones and the Joseph Gordon-Levitt bank robbery movie The Lookout (which coincidentally or not also starred Jeff Daniels).
With Godless, Soderbergh has his hand in yet another recent, successful television series. He is an executive producer on Amazon’s coming-of-age summer comedy series Red Oaks, Cinemax’s 1900s medical drama The Knick and Starz’s adaptation of Soderbergh’s own 2009 feature The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh has also directed all twenty episodes of The Knick so far.
Jeff Daniels had a very successful year last year coming off of his Emmy-winning turn as Will McAvoy on HBO’s The Newsroom. He was in Ridley Scott’s Golden Globe winning The Martian alongside a star-studded cast, and once again gave Aaron Sorkin’s words life as John Sculley in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. Scoot McNairy is in high-demand as well. He can currently be seen on AMC’s tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, and was most recently seen as wheelchair bound Wallace Keefe in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. On the horizon McNairy has 478 with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sleepless with Michelle Monaghan and Jamie Foxx, and The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter along with Josh Brolin and Danny McBride. McNairy even has a relationship with Netflix already, as he will soon be seen in David Michod’s (Animal Kingdom, The Rover) Netflix original movie War Machine starring Brad Pitt.