Netflix releases trailer for Ryan Murphy’s glossy queer retelling of the Golden Age of Hollywood
Patti LuPone in Hollywood, the new Netflix series from Ryan Murphy. (Netflix)
Hollywood, a Netflix limited series, goes behind the velvet rope to explore how Tinseltown was – and is – a system which excludes LGBT+ people and people of colour.
Netflix has released the first trailer for Hollywood, the new Ryan Murphy series which “follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost”.
The Hollywood trailer suggests the series will be peak Murphy: full of sex, glamour and drama on the surface, beneath which lies timely commentary on the way women, LGBT+ people and people of colour are treated in society.
When is Hollywood out on Netflix?
All seven episodes of Hollywood are released on Netflix on May 1.
Ryan Murpy and co-creator Ian Brennan have assembled a starry cast filled with acting legends and queer icons for the seven-part series, including Patti LuPone, Holland Taylor, Queen Latifah and The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons.
The inspiration for Hollywood came after Murphy had dinner with Darren Criss, who also appears in the series.
“Ever since I did ‘Feud’ [his series about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford], I had been working on a piece about the buried history of Hollywood,” he told USA Today.
“I was very interested, even as a young person, in three people: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong and Hattie McDaniel.
“I’d been sort of noodling with that and then Darren Criss and I had dinner and we were talking about what we wanted to work on next.
And we both wanted to do something that would be inspirational, upbeat and that had a happy ending, that was about victories.
Janet Mock, an executive producer on the series, said she jumped at the chance to explore a different kind of Hollywood.
“What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story?” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of colour? The matinee idol openly gay?
“And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”
Jeremy Pope plays Archie in Hollywood, with Darren Criss as Raymond. (Netflix)
The full cast of Hollywood.
Hollywood stars David Corenswet as Jack, Darren Criss as Raymond, Jeremy Pope as Archie, Laura Harrier as Camille, Samara Weaving as Claire, Dylan McDermott as Ernie, Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Patti LuPone as Avis, Jim Parsons as Henry Willson, Jake Picking as Rock Hudson, Joe Mantello as Dick, and Maude Apatow as Henrietta.
