Lisa Kudrow Cast As Lead In New Taika Waititi Series
Lisa Kudrow will star in Taika Waititi's new television adaption of Time Bandits.
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Taika Waititi is a very, very busy man these days, with more upcoming projects than you can shake a stick at, including an almost certainly canceled Star Wars project and a bunch of stuff for Netflix. One of those projects is a television adaptation of the 1981 cult fantasy film Time Bandits, which has been in development at Apple TV+ since 2019 and has finally begun to announce casting decisions. According to Deadline, Friends star Lisa Kudrow has been cast in a leading role in the Time Bandits series, which will undoubtedly be a good use of her comedic talents.
Lisa Kudrow will star in Time Bandits as a character named Penelope, presumably one of the titular band of reality-skipping thieves. The casting announcement also includes Charlyne Yi, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva, Tadhg Murphy, Rachel House, Rune Temte, Kiera Thompson, and Kal-El Tuck. The lattermost actor will presumably be playing the eleven-year-old history buff who is kidnapped by a group of ragtag, would-be treasure hunters who happen to have “acquired” a map of the universe that allows them to travel through holes in time and space.
The original Time Bandits film was directed by Terry Gilliam, who co-wrote it with his Monty Python teammate Michael Palin (who also appeared in the film along with their fellow John Cleese. It was a surprise hit at the time, premiering at number one at the box office in the United States and the United Kingdom, allowing Terry Gilliam the cache to make the much darker and weirder fantasy films Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The film had a much more family-friendly tone than many of Terry Gilliam’s projects, which probably accounts for the presence of Lisa Kudrow in the television adaptation.
Then again, perhaps not. While Lisa Kudrow may be far and away most famous for being one of the stars of the mega-successful NBC sitcom Friends, her work after the show has heavily leaned toward dark, acidic comedies like her HBO series The Comeback and the web-series-turned-Showtime-series Web Therapy. We will have to wait and see which version of Lisa Kudrow we see this time around, but given the legendary weirdness of the original, there probably will not be that much “Smelly Cat.”
The original Time Bandits movie featured appearances from Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cohorts, but also ringers like Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, theater legend Ralph Richardson, and a career-best turn from the late David Warner, who played the personification of all evil. It seems likely that an Apple TV+ version with several episodes directed by Taika Waititi will do something similar with contemporaneous stars.
In addition to directing and co-writing several episodes of Time Bandits starring Lisa Kudrow, Taika Waititi is starring in the acclaimed HBO series Our Flag Means Death as Blackbeard the pirate, producing the also-acclaimed FX series Reservation Dogs, and is directing and developing several series for Netflix based on the works of Roald Dahl. The man sure likes to stay busy.
