Line of Duty actor Tommy Jessop and his brother called on the likes of Game of Thrones star Kit Harington and Scream icon Neve Campbell amid their bid to make a groundbreaking Hollywood movie

When it comes to breaking America, the streets are littered with the broken dreams and severely dented egos of many a British actor.

So the thought of a pair of brothers turning up in Los Angeles with a hand-held camera and the hope of making the first Down syndrome superhero film seems unlikely to succeed. But then again when one of those brothers is Line of Duty star Tommy Jessop, who shot to fame in the show as murder suspect Terry Boyle, determination and a tendency to beat the odds is something he has in spades.

Soon 38-year-old Tommy and his brother Will have drafted in stars such as Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington and Scream actor Neve Campbell, charmed their way into a stunt training day to shoot an action trailer before flying out to LA in a bid to get a Hollywood movie – Roger the Superhero – made.

Tommy says: “I have watched countless superhero films in the past and I think it’s about time someone with Down syndrome should play a superhero. We should always be speaking up for the rights of people with Down syndrome so that we are able to make our own choices in life.”

And while his character in Line of Duty was watched by more than 12 million viewers, after the finale in 2021 Tommy has found work has been a little thin on the ground. Deciding to take matters into his own hands he teams up with his filmmaker brother Will to do a one-off BBC special, Tommy Jessop goes to Hollywood.

In the documentary, Tommy and Will employ various tactics to get Hollywood to notice Roger, including sending video messages to A-listers to ask them to play Tommy’s baddie, prompting GoT star Kit to read with Tommy for the role. Kit says: “My cousin, Laurent, has Down syndrome and I’ve always felt with him that he has abilities that I don’t have, and that people with Down syndrome don’t have.
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“Aladdin” and “Charlie’s Angels” breakout Naomi Scott will star alongside “Game of Thrones” alum Kit Harrington and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons in the epic romance “Eternal Return,” Variety can report exclusively. Village Roadshow Pictures is producing the project and will introduce the film to buyers at next week’s Cannes Film Festival.

“Eternal Return” follows Cass (Scott), a young woman who has resigned herself to a life of emotional invulnerability until she meets Virgil (Harington), a cartographer who makes maps to imaginary places. Along with his partner Malcolm (Irons), a vibrant renaissance man, the pair relentlessly attempts to travel back in time to awaken Cass to love again. The original feature is written and directed by Yaniv Raz (“Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets”).

Jillian Apfelbaum, Tristen Tuckfield, and Nic Gordon are overseeing the project for Village Roadshow. They will produce alongside Scott and Jordan Spence’s New Name Entertainment. The in-house production is one of several that Village Roadshow, led by veteran executive Steve Mosko, has been cooking throughout the pandemic. Though the company has wide brand recognition, Village Roadshow was a passive film financier until Mosko landed at the shop in late 2018. Historically, it has had a hand in older performers like “Miss Congeniality” and “The Matrix” up to the recent Joaquin Phoenix box office juggernaut “Joker.”
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Make My Money Matter, a campaign group founded by filmmaker and activist Richard Curtis (“Love Actually”), has launched a new short film starring “Game of Thrones” stars and real life couple Kit Harington and Rose Leslie, in a bid to increase pressure on U.K. high street banks to cease financing the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

The film, titled “Couples Therapy,” showcases how major banks continue to finance the industry, despite warnings from the International Energy Agency that doing so could trigger a climate catastrophe. In the film, Harington and Leslie personify the banks and their oil and gas clients, playing out an unhealthy relationship in a tongue-in-cheek couples’ therapy session.

The film follows the recent release of the Banking on Climate Chaos report, which revealed that the top U.K. banks collectively financed $37.3 billion towards the fossil fuel sector in 2022 alone. Since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2016, the U.K. Big Five banks have funnelled $419 billion to the fossil fuel industry, with $141 billion going towards the top 100 fossil fuel expanders globally.

According to Make My Money Matter, the majority of U.K. bank customers are unaware that their bank may be financing fossil fuel companies that are developing new oil and gas projects. To increase awareness of the issue, the campaign has invited the public to join them in writing directly to the Big Five banks.
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Kit Harington is about to start production on his next drama for HBO and no — we’re not talking about the Jon Snow sequel.

Deadline has learned that Harington is joining season 3 of Industry, the series HBO is producing with the BBC by Bad Wolf. The Game of Thrones star will recur as as Henry Muck, the CEO and Founder of Lumi, an exciting green tech energy company that’s about to go public.

Production will begin this month in the UK on season 3, which will be comprised of eight episodes.

Industry gives an insider’s view of the blackbox of high finance following a group of young bankers as they forge their identities within the pressure cooker environment of international bank Pierpoint & Co’s London office.

In season three, as Pierpoint looks to the future and takes a big bet on ethical investing, the desk find themselves front and center in the splashy IPO of Lumi, a green tech energy company, in a story that runs all the way to the very top of finance, media and government.

Industry is created, written and executive produced by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. The series is a Bad Wolf Production for HBO/BBC and is executive produced by Jane Tranter, Kate Crowther, and Ryan Rasmussen for Bad Wolf, and Rebecca Ferguson for BBC.

Last summer, it was revealed that HBO is exploring a potential GoT sequel centered around Jon Snow. If the series comes to fruition, it would chronicle the post-Westeros story of Jon Snow, aka Aegon Targayen, with Harington expected to reprise his role.

At December’s GoT convention in L.A., Harington couldn’t say much about the development of the show, but he did talk about how he thinks his character got off lightly at end of the series. “When we find him in that cell, he’s preparing to be beheaded and he wants to be,” Harington told fans. “He’s done. The fact he goes to the Wall is the greatest gift and also the greatest curse.”

Harington is represented by United Agents, UTA, and Jackoway, Austen, Tyerman, Wertheimer, Mandelbaum, Morris, Bernstein, Trattner, & Klein. [Source]

Sienna Miller, Meryl Streep, Forest Whitaker and Kit Harington are among the international cast of Apple TV+’s ambitious limited series, which asks what happens to humanity in the near future, when global warming upends every aspect of our lives, including the way we love and grieve.

This story is part of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2023 Sustainability Issue.

When Sienna Miller arrived on the set of Extrapolations for the first day of filming in October 2021, a Native American shaman came to bless the grounds. There were no printed signs directing her where to go, or stacks of paper scripts available for producers to scribble their notes in the margins. Instead, there were clothing racks filled with thrifted and vintage garments sustainably sourced by the costume department, water stations for refilling nonplastic bottles, compostable plates and utensils, and plant-based craft services. It was the greenest set the actress says she’s ever been on.

“It was really environmentally conscious, and that was a treat,” says Miller. “I’ve been on sets with bamboo stools, but nothing to the degree that this was.”

That difference was intentional on the part of Scott Z. Burns, writer, director and creator of the new Apple TV+ series, and executive producers Dorothy Fortenberry and Media Res’ Michael Ellenberg.

“Dorothy and I, along with Media Res and Apple, felt that if we were going to make this show, we needed to try and make it in the way that the subject matter required of us,” says Burns.

All filming took place throughout New York City’s five boroughs, drastically reducing the project’s carbon footprint. But the greatest success of the production, which employed the help of Green Spark Group, a consulting firm that trains filmmakers on how to reduce their environmental impact during production, was simply demonstrating what’s possible when it comes to how we engage with the Earth and with each another.

Which is precisely the point of Extrapolations. Rather than fixate on hypotheticals about what the planet might be like if humans continue on our current path or depict a distant, apocalyptic-like universe, the eight-episode drama drops viewers in near-future societies around the world where its characters’ entire relationship to one another revolves around the climate issues many believe we still have the luxury to ignore. And that, in and of itself, is terrifying, says Yara Shahidi, another member of the star-studded cast.
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“It should scare you, and it will scare you, but it’s also really thought-provoking,” Harington said of Scott Z. Burns’ climate change anthology series.

When it comes to environmental storytelling, there’s several different routes a project can take. Some have opted for scaring an audience into action (like Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up) while others have tried to Trojan horse climate messages into more uplifting fare, or take a more by-the-numbers documentary approach.

For Extrapolations, Apple TV+’s new anthology drama following eight different stories of people’s lives upended by climate change, creator Scott Z. Burns is taking inspiration from another future-looking anthology series, as star Kit Harington recalled how “Scott always described this to me as a kind of Black Mirror of a climate change show, and I think it falls in that.”

“There are thriller elements to it, there are horror elements to it and it should scare you, and it will scare you, but it’s also really thought-provoking,” Harington told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday. The star also commended the extensive research Burns put into the show, saying, “I think in time it’ll become a really historical piece; whatever anyone thinks of it now, when we fast-forward in 50 years’ time, people will be looking at this going, ‘Well, that’s what they thought would happen, they were right or they were wrong,’ and that was irresistible to me.”

Burns, who sees the climate crisis as “the most important issue of our time,” said when the show was greenlit he called up McKay — who has become a climate activist in life as well as through projects like Don’t Look Up — and “he said a really amazing thing, he said, ‘I hope that someday you and I are sitting around and there’s 10 climate change shows like there’s 10 hospital shows or 10 lawyer shows.’ So, I really hope that one of the things this will do is tell people there are stories to be made about what is happening all around us.”

As the writer of 2011’s Contagion, which many pointed to as having predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, Burns has somewhat of a reputation for seeing future crises, though he sees the two experiences differently.
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