While HBO’s 2016 series The Young Pope was intended as a limited series prestige project from BAFTA-winning director Paolo Sorrentino, plans subsequently emerged for a follow-up series, titled The New Pope. Indeed, the follow up series will showcase a new pope, since HBO has sent white smoke signals of confirmation for Oscar-winning actor John Malkovich.
Yes, John Malkovich has been officially revealed as the star of the sequel. While the details of Malkovich’s character were not provided, the very title of the follow-up series does little to hide the fate of said character. While the title, The New Pope, has been known for over a year, having arrived quickly after The Young Pope completed its early-2017 run, it was provocative, since the first series concluded with cliffhanger regarding the fate of Jude Law’s titular pontiff.
Interestingly, while Law is being touted as a co-star for The New Pope, the specifics about his prospective role reprisal were left just as mysterious as the details about Malkovich’s role. This means that Law’s role could be anything from a series regular to a quick turnover cameo, leading to the ascension of Malkovich’s character to the papacy. Driving this point home, HBO’s tweet about Malkovich’s casting, stating “welcome to the papacy,” seemingly confirms the character’s destiny.
2017’s The Young Pope depicted the fictional scenario with the tumultuous early tenure of the first American pope, Lenny Belardo, a.k.a. Pope Pius XIII. Arriving unconventionally as an American, one who’s exceptionally young for the position, Lenny is a chain-smoking papal bull in a Vatican china shop, uprooting the behind-the-scenes political machinations of power players who normally work in the shadows, while at the same time alienating devotees with an agenda of hardline Catholic views.
New star John Malkovich arrives as a cinematic icon, known from a multitude of memorable films across genres such as Dangerous Liaisons, Con Air and the monumentally-meta movie, Being John Malkovich. He received Best Supporting Oscar nominations for In The Line Of Fire in 1994 and Places Of The Heart in 1985. Malkovich is coming off a recent television run on Showtime’s Billions and will next be seen playing Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot, in the Amazon Prime Video/BBC One TV movie, The ABC Murders.
Star Jude Law, on the other hand, appears to be wrapping this role, since he’s fielding a backlog full of major movies, notably in the November-scheduled sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, in which he will play a younger Albus Dumbledore, as well as the March 2019-scheduled Captain Marvel as the original version of the titular hero, Mar-Vell, and the December 2020-scheduled Sherlock Holmes 3, in which he reprises his role of Dr. John Watson.
Paolo Sorrentino, who wrote and directed The Young Pope, will return to write The New Pope, with Umberto Contarello and Stefano Bises also working on the script.
The New Pope air date
The New Pope does not have a release date, but production will commence in November in Italy.