“Deadwood” and “John Wick” alum Ian McShane has scored a key role opposite Lincoln Younes (“Down Under,” “Little Monsters,” “Grand Hotel”) in the Australian drama series “Last King of the Cross” for the Paramount+ service.
Inspired by John Ibrahim’s best-selling autobiography, the operatic story tracks Ibrahim’s rise from a poverty-stricken immigrant with no education, no money, and no prospects, to Australia’s most infamous nightclub mogul in Sydney’s Kings Cross – a half a mile strip with every form of criminality on offer.
McShane will play Ezra Shipman, the reigning King of The Cross who for three generations was Sydney’s most feared man with his hands in gambling, prostitution, and strip joints.
Now confronting his looming mortality and no-one to leave it to, he embraces an adolescent facsimile of himself in the form of the young, brash, ambitious, and intelligent John (Younes). Ezra takes the young man into his inner circle as his acolyte… but who is exploiting who?
Filming begins in Sydney in May for Helium Pictures. Mark Fennessy and Karl Zwicky produce while Kieran Darcy-Smith will direct.
Source: Deadline