Ready for your weekly helping of Wednesday Wisdom? Empire has lifted the lid on a new image for American Gods, placing Ian McShane (Deadwood, Game of Thrones) front and center as the glowering Mr. Wednesday.
An instrumental component of Shadow Moon’s (Ricky Whittle) clash with the new gods, Mr. Wednesday is a conman and grifter, and one of the many intriguing characters lining Starz’s roster. In bringing American Gods to the small-screen, the network has set Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) as showrunner and Neil Gaiman – the creative mastermind behind the original novel – told Empire that this adaptation is shaping up to be “Clash Of The Titans meets The Grifters.”
That presents Fuller and Co. with plenty of rich story material to mine from, as Starz goes about engineering a “meticulous weave of characters and storylines” for premiere in 2017.”
“We want to craft a Marvel Universe with many different mythologies of higher beings. [We’re] executing a meticulous weave of characters and storylines, really getting into the nooks and crannies.”
“The series tells the tale of an atheist who becomes an agnostic who becomes a believer who becomes a zealot who becomes a demi-god who becomes a god. That’s your series arc.”
Starz has penciled in American Gods for premiere in early 2017. Also on board are Gillian Anderson, Emily Browning, Yetide Badaki, Cloris Leachman, Ian McShane, Pablo Schreiber, Peter Stormare, Crispin Glover and Orlando Jones.
American Gods has been translated into over 30 languages and earned numerous accolades including Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker Awards for Best Novel. The plot posits a war brewing between old and new gods: the traditional gods of mythological roots from around the world steadily losing believers to an upstart pantheon of gods reflecting society’s modern love of money, technology, media, celebrity and drugs. Its protagonist, Shadow Moon, is an ex-con who becomes bodyguard and traveling partner to Mr. Wednesday, a conman but in reality one of the older gods, on a cross-country mission to gather his forces in preparation to battle the new deities.