It’s been well over a year since we last heard any news from Apple TV+’s adaptation of the Isaac Asimov classic trilogy Foundation and now it’s been announced that Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Lee Pace and Chernobyl‘s Jared Harris have signed on to star in the lead roles, according to Deadline.
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The show, based on the books that inspired films such as Star Wars, will “chronicle the thousand-year saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it.”
Pace, who is also known for his work on AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, has signed on to portray Brother Day, the current Emperor of the Galaxy while Harris, who also was last seen on the small screen in AMC’s The Terror, is set to star as Hari Seldon, a mathematical genius who predicts the demise of the Galactic Empire.
Skydance Television acquired the Foundation series in June, according to the report, and hired David S. Goyer (Batman Begins) and Josh Friedman (Avatar 2) to “crack the code” and bring it to the screen. The package was sold to Apple in spring 2017 after a competitive bidding war.
Originally published as a series of eight short stories in Astounding Magazine beginning in 1942, Foundation offers a complex saga about humans who are scattered on planets throughout the galaxy, living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. A psycho-historian, who can scientifically read the future, sees an imminent empire collapse and sets to work preparing to save the knowledge of mankind.
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The books originally formed a trilogy (which also includes Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation), but Asimov wound up completing seven Foundation books before his passing in 1992.
Among the various iterations of Foundation that have been planned over the years include a defunct feature film version from Roland Emmerich and, most recently, an alternate small screen version that Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan was developing for HBO and Warner Bros. Television.
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