Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, who pulled double-duty on the Broadway smash playing both the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, has really broken though. In addition to landing roles on The Get Down and black-ish and his upcoming role on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, he’s now set to lead TNT’s adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi film Snowpiercer.

For those who haven’t seen Snowpiercer (It’s excellent! See it!), the film takes place in a second Ice Age triggered by mankind’s attempts to stop global warming. The few survivors of mankind live on a constantly moving train that’s divided by class. The rich people live in the front of the train, while the poor people live in the back.

Per EW, Diggs will play Layton Well, “a prisoner barely surviving the harsh conditions in the tail end of the train. A quiet thinker who spends his days sniffing the industrial-waste-turned-drug Chronole and tending to his cage full of rats, Layton becomes a reluctant participant in a struggle that could upend life on the train.”

I like that rather than simply remaking Bong’s film, they’re taking the setting and then reapplying it for longform storytelling, which could definitely work. While Bong’s movie is about the desperate push for revolution, a TV show could move things at a slightly slower pace and really dig into some of the finer points of this world that the movie didn’t have time to explore.

Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange) will direct the pilot and serve as executive producer. Josh Friedman (the critically acclaimed but short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) will serve as showrunner. Joon Ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Tae-hun, and Dooho Choi are also executive producers alongside Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements. Assuming the pilot gets pick up for a series, no release date has been announced yet.

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Image via The Weinstein Company
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Image via The Weinstein Company

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