If you watched Barry all the way through to its conclusion, you’re likely aware that Bill Hader is a kind of dark guy. He’s always talking about his fascination with serial killers and murderers, and now he’s channeling that fascination into a project for HBO. Variety is reporting that Hader will co-write and potentially star in a new HBO series about the infamous Jonestown massacre.
Hader is co-writing the series with Daniel Zelman, and while it’s still in development, the show could potentially be Hader’s next star vehicle with HBO, where he also worked on Barry.
Jim Jones is an infamous historical figure who founded the Peoples Temple in the 1950s and eventually founded Jonestown in Guyana in the 1970s. His story and the story of his followers eventually came to international attention after he and over 900 of his followers committed suicide en masse in 1978.
Jonestown has been studied across a number of books, but it has not been adapted to TV or the big screen since 1980. Funnily enough, this news comes as a Jonestown movie has become a plot point on Apple TV+’s series The Studio, although there’s no connection between the two projects.
Although Hader’s roots are in comedy, this new series suggests that he is interested in exploring more purely dramatic material moving forward. This was also true of Barry, which started out as a comedy and gradually morphed into something that, while funny, had a much darker and more experimental tone. There’s no word yet on when this series would be released if HBO were to move forward with it.