Starz has cast three actors in their upcoming original series Counterpart: V for Vendetta‘s Stephen Rea, The West Wing‘s Richard Schiff and The Tudors‘ Sarah Bolger. They will appear in recurring roles in the series led by J.K. Simmons (Whiplash).
Counterpart is the story of Howard Silk (Simmons), a lowly cog in a bureaucratic agency, who discovers that the agency he works for is really guarding a crossing into a parallel dimension. Through Howard and his ‘counterpart’ on the other side, the show will navigate themes of identity, what ifs and lost love. Starz ordered two 10 episode seasons in 2015 and the show just began production last month.
Rea has been cast as Alexander Pope, a “charming old-world Englishman and an old friend of Prime, he’s an éminence grise who pulls strings from behind the scenes and knows where all the bodies are buried — sometimes quite literally — in the complex and covert machinations on the ‘other side’.”
Schiff will play Director of Diplomacy Roland Fancher, “an expert litigator and feared power negotiator between both dimensions in the series. Fancher is the head of the Office of Interchange’s diplomacy department, responsible for negotiating the exchange of prisoners between worlds.”
Bolger will portray Anna, “a mysterious young woman whose appearance on the “other side” threatens to disrupt the tenuous truce between Howard and his counterpart”.
Also staring in Counterpart are Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense) as Emily Burton Silk, Harry Lloyd (The Theory of Everything) as Peter Quayle, Nazanin Boniadi (Homeland) as Clare, Nicholas Pinnock as Ian Shaw, Sara Serraiocco (Salvo) as Baldwin and Ulrich Thomsen (The Blacklist) as Aldrich.