Starz has announced today that Oscar-nominated actor Stephen Rea (V for Vendetta, The Crying Game), Emmy-award winner Richard Schiff (The Affair, The West Wing) and Sarah Bolger (Agent Carter, Once Upon a Time) have joined the cast of their original series Counterpart as recurring guest stars.
Created and written by Justin Marks (The Jungle Book), Counterpart is the story of ‘Howard Silk’ played by Oscar winner J.K. Simmons (Whiplash, Spider-Man), a lowly cog in a bureaucratic agency, who discovers that the agency he works for is really guarding a crossing into a parallel dimension. Through Howard and his “Counterpart” on the other side, the show will navigate themes of identity, what ifs, and lost love. Starz ordered two seasons of 10 episodes each of Counterpart in 2015. The series began production in December 2016 in Los Angeles and will continue in additional locations across the U.S. and Europe.
Richard Schiff will portray Director of Diplomacy Roland Fancher, an expert litigator and feared power negotiator between both dimensions in the series – an espionage thriller with a metaphysical twist. ‘Fancher’ is the head of the Office of Interchange’s diplomacy department, responsible for negotiating the exchange of prisoners between worlds.
Stephen Rea will play Alexander Pope, a charming old-world Englishman and an old friend of Prime, he’s an éminence grise who pulls strings from behind the scenes and knows where all the bodies are buried — sometimes quite literally — in the complex and covert machinations on the “other side.” Rea was nominated for an Academy Award® in 1994 for The Crying Game and won a BAFTA TV Award in 2015 for Best Supporting Actor for The Honourable Woman. He is repped by ICM Partners and Manager Sue Leibman-Barking Dog Entertainment.
Sarah Bolger plays Anna, a mysterious young woman whose appearance on the “other side” threatens to disrupt the tenuous truce between Howard and his counterpart. Bolger is repped by CAA, Troika and Mosaic.
Counterpart also stars Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense, Hyde Park on Hudson) as Emily Burton Silk; Harry Lloyd (The Theory of Everything) as Peter Quayle; Nazanin Boniadi (Homeland, Ben-Hur) as Clare; Nicholas Pinnock (Captain America: The First Avenger) as Ian Shaw; Sara Serraiocco (Salvo, Cloro) as Baldwin and Ulrich Thomsen (The Blacklist, Banshee) as Aldrich.
