Elisabeth Moss, Wagner Moura hunt for a killer in Shining Girls trailer
Apple TV Plus' upcoming thriller Shining Girls is based on Lauren Beukes novel of the same name
TV News Elisabeth Moss
Apple TV+ released the official first-look and teaser trailer for its upcoming thriller, Shining Girls, at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. The show is based on Lauren Beukes’ critically acclaimed 2013 novel of the same name, and stars Elisabeth Moss in the leading role.
Moss plays Kirby Mazrachi, a Chicago newspaper archivist who puts her burgeoning journalistic ambitions on hold after a traumatic assault. She struggles to understand her ever-changing present and to confront her past. When she discovers that some recent unsolved murders mirror her own case, she teams up with troubled reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to try and uncover her attacker’s identity.
As seen in the first trailer, Kirby is still haunted by what she went through, and her perception of reality keeps shifting often because of it. Her blurred reality allows her assailant to always remain one step ahead of her. Kirby and Dan’s investigation also helps them realize how these cold cases are inextricably linked to their own trauma.
Shining Girls will be Brazilian actor Moura’s first big TV role since his scene-stealing performance as Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s Narcos for two seasons, a character he briefly reprised in Narcos: Mexico. Moss returns to the small screen after Mad Men, Top Of The Lake, and four seasons of the ongoing The Handmaid’s Tale. The award-winning Hulu drama has already been renewed for a fifth season.
Created by Silka Luisa, Shining Girls also stars Philipa Soo, Amy Brenneman, and Jamie Bell. Moss, who is a co-producer along with Leonardo DiCaprio, Lindsey McManus, Jennifer Davisson and Michael Hampton, is also directing multiple episodes of the show.
Shining Girls consists of eight episodes. It will debut with the first three outings on Apple TV+ on April 29, 2022, followed by a new one dropping every week.
13 Comments
All five of Beukes’ novels and her short story collection are excellent.The Shining Girls has some really grisly stuff in it. I think she has worked as a journalist covering crime in Johannesburg and it really shows in a lot of her books. I wonder how it will be handled.
Yeah, I was going to say that the book was interesting but very dour, and that might be wearying over a full series. But it also seems like this might be a somewhat loose interpretation (although it’s hard to say since a) I don’t remember the book that clearly, and b) they may be trying to make the trailer opaque).
It’s great to see so much real Chicago in there. I actually almost walked directly into Elisabeth Moss’s shot while trying to catch the Brown Line in the Loop last summer.
Beukes lived in Chicago for a short time and she is a great reseaecher. She references a Cubs-Cardinals game in the book. She could have just made up the details and it would not have mattered, but out of curiosity I looked up the date on baseballreference.com and it went down exactly as she said in the book.I’ve lived here all my life and when I first read “The Shining Girls,” I thought she had too.
The fact that despite being a co-lead in this show Moura doesn’t utter a single line in the whole trailer, plus his character being named “Dan Velasquez”, makes me assume that the producers made the same totally avoidable mistake from Narcos: giving Moura, who is a genuinely fantastic actor on his own, the role of a Latin American character from a Spanish speaking country, a thing that really hurts Moura’s acting because as anyone who has watched “Narcos” know, Moura can’t fake a convincing Spanish accent. Moura learnt Spanish specifically for Narcos (he didn’t speak it before that) but being Brazilian never managed to nail the accent (for the people who still gets this wrong, Brazilians speak Portuguese).P.S.: “Velasquez” indicates Spanish speaking roots. A Brazilian would have “Velasques”, the Portuguese form, as a surname.
Unfortunately, nothing new under the sky. The US thinks everyone below TX speaks not only Spanish, but the same kind of Spanish, treats us all as interchangeable (though God forbid we confuse them with Canadians or Australians), and calls it a day. Wagner Moura’s Spanish accent is not good, but most Americans won’t be able to tell he’s not a native speaker.
Moss is older than Kirby is in the book & missing her punk aesthetic. The trailer makes it sound like Harper is changing events but the book is specifically a closed loop time travel story.
Yeah, but who else are you gonna get to play a traumatised woman on screen? I’m pretty sure Moss has a patent on that character.
Clearly Emma Dumont needs a better agent.
Once a casting agent gets a look at her eyes in close-up it’s all over. She’s like The Wiz.
I’m so excited to see Wagner Moura show up in a major project again. He was unbelievably good in Narcos, so it’s been weird that he’s been (at least in the US; I’m sure he’s been working plenty in Latin and/or South America) pretty absent from our screens.
Apple+ TV seems to get this whole streaming service thing right. They don’t have much content yet, but what they’re putting on is good. I don’t watch everything they put on, but none of their shows seem to be filler.
Dude in the upper left of the photo…that’s the killer.