Helltown, Amazon's new series about the life of American novelist and satirist Kurt Vonnegut might have just found itself a leading man in Oscar Isaac. Isaac is reportedly in talks with the streaming platform and Robert Downey Jr's production company to take on the lead role as Vonnegut for the upcoming production.

The Guatemalan-born American actor has already got an impressive acting résumé under his belt, having appeared in A Most Violent Year (2014), Ex Machina (2015), and more recently in Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021). He's no stranger to TV either, having starred alongside Jessica Chastain in HBO's miniseries Scenes From a Marriage.

 

Who is Kurt Vonnegut?

Vonnegut became well-known in the USA as a novelist and satirical writer in the late 1960s, and early 1970s. His World War II novel Slaughterhouse-Five captured the imagination of the American public, who were placing focus another war in Vietnam at the time. Vonnegut's writing was influenced in large part by the author's time spent in the US Army, and later as a prisoner of war in Germany.

Despite the the heavy subject matter of his writing, Vonnegut was remarkable for his melancholic wit and dark sense of humour. When he died in 2007 at the age of 84, he left behind fourteen novels, five plays, three short story collections, and five nonfiction works.

 

What do we know so far about Helltown?

Helltown will be an eight-episode television series based on a book of the same name by Casey Sherman. It will also be directed by All Quiet on the Western Front's Oscar-winning filmmaker (as of yesterday) Ed Berger.

Each hour-long episode will focus on the young Vonnegut's life before fame, as a struggling writer living with his wife and five children in Cape Cod. When two local women go missing and are later discovered murdered on the outskirts of Provincetown, the writer is consumed by trying to solve the chilling mystery.