Touted in the same breath with Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Days Later (2002) as one of England’s greatest films from the Oasis age, the 2000 gangster drama Sexy Beast starring Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone will be adapted into a television series by Anonymous Content and Paramount Television.
As originally reported by Deadline on Wednesday night, the planned series will serve as a prequel to the film by tracing the origin stories of lead characters Gal Dove, Don Logan and Teddy Bass: a trio of Londoners who became associates in the city’s bustling criminal underworld.
Ben Kingsley received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of the profane henchman Don Logan; while Winstone (Cold Mountain, The Departed) and future Deadwood star Ian McShane played Dove (a brilliant thief) and Bass, respectively. In the film, Bass presides as a crime lord with a hot tip who dispatches Logan to recruit Dove out of retirement in rural Spain for one final heist.
Unwilling to jeopardize his idyllic existence by following Logan back to London, Dove and his wife incur the gangster’s growing menace in a role that became one of the most unhinged depictions of villainy on film in the last twenty years.
Kingsley also received a Critic’s Choice Award for his performance, while Sexy Beast went on to win Best Director and Best Screenplay from the Independent British Film Awards. English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer directed from the screenplay by writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto. (Glazer, by the way, is also famed for directing several iconic music videos from the ’90s, most notably “Karma Police” by Radiohead and “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai.)
While the studios did not provide a timeline for the series’ development, Deadline reports that they’re seeking a buyer from a cable or streaming network to host the story of how the film’s centerpieces became intertwined together in the “vibrant and volatile” shadows of 1990′s London.
The project will be executive produced by the film’s writers, Mellis and Scinto, as well as Anonymous Content’s Nicole Clemens and Steve Golin.
Writer Michael Caleo–whose credits include The Sopranos and FX’s Rescue Me–will pen the adaptation and also executive produce.
Anonymous Content and Paramount TV have previously teamed to produce the series Berlin Station on Epix, 13 Reasons Why (Netflix), The Alienist (TNT) and the forthcoming series Catch-22 (Hulu) and Maniac on Netflix.
In 2004, Sexy Beast was named the 15th greatest British film of all-time by Total Film. A September 2016 evaluation of the country’s filmmaking gems by the English pop-culture webzine Empire ranked it 43rd–slotting it in the neighborhood between A Fish Called Wanda and Shakespeare in Love.
Upon its debut, Sexy Beast will join the company of other film-to-TV renderings like Fargo (FX), From Dusk till Dawn (Netflix/Amazon) and Training Day (CBS) that have downshifted to the small screen in recent years.
