Janicza Bravo to direct pilot of FX’s Kindred based on Octavia E. Butler novel with Mallori Johnson set to star
Deadline is reporting that Zola helmer Janicza Bravo has been tapped to direct and executive produce FX pilot Kindred, an adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s influential novel, with newcomer Mallori Johnson set to star. The project hails from writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), Courtney Lee-Mitchell (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Darren Aronofsky and his Protozoa Pictures (Black Swan, The Wrestler), Joe Weisberg (The Americans) and Joel Fields (Fosse/Verdon). FX Productions is the studio. Production is scheduled to begin in September.
Johnson will play the central character Dana, a young Black woman and aspiring writer who has uprooted her life of familial obligation and relocated to Los Angeles, ready to claim a future that, for once, feels all her own. But, before she can get settled into her new home, she finds herself being violently pulled back and forth in time to a nineteenth-century plantation with which she and her family are most surprisingly and intimately linked. An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood, in this genre-breaking exploration of the ties that bind.
Jacobs-Jenkins wrote the pilot and will executive produce with Lee-Mitchell, Aronofsky and Ari Handel of Protozoa Pictures, Weisberg, Fields, Ernestine Walker, Merrilee Heifetz and Bravo.
Most recently, Bravo directed and co-wrote the critically acclaimed film Zola starring Taylour Paige and Riley Keough. Johnson landed the coveted role after her 2021 graduation from The Juilliard School.