Mags GarganBritish star Jude Law has been cast as a fictional young American Pope for a new television series, directed by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino.
The actor will play Italian-American Lenny Belardo, a conservative “recruited by a Vatican fed up with liberals” who is thrust into the papacy as Pope Pius XIII, and must grapple with his faith and the power structures of the Church.
The 42-year-old father of five was first attached to the project in March and his role was confirmed by the show’s writers at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sorrentino, who will co-write the eight-part series The Young Pope, said it would explore “the inner struggle between the huge responsibility of the head of the Catholic Church and the miseries of the simple man that fate (or the Holy Spirit) chose as Pontiff”.
Announcing the casting, programme makers said the role of Belardo would be “a complex and conflicted character” who is “stubbornly resistant to the Vatican courtiers” and “full of compassion towards the weak and poor”.
“During the series, Belardo will face losing those closest to him and the constant fear of being abandoned, even by his God,” a statement said, but he is a man who is “not afraid of undertaking the millennial mission of defending that same
God and the world representing Him”.