REACHING FOR MARS
While other big-name Hollywood stars got with the New-goldenage TV programme years ago, Sean Penn was always the hold-out. He may have popped up in sitcoms such as Friends and Ellen, but the 57-year-old actor has never taken a leading role in even the mini-est of mini-series. Until now.
“We were told he didn’t want to do television,” says Jordan Tappis, executive producer of new Hulu show The First. “And then he read the script...” That script was the pilot for an eight-episode first season of a series about nothing less ambitious than the first-ever manned mission to Mars, set in the closefuture of the 2030s. Yet it wasn’t so much a personal enthusiasm for astronautical endeavour that hooked Penn as, quite simply, the quality of the writing.
“When Sean dives into a role he dives completely, so his interest in the subject matter grew over time,” Tappis says. “But what got him into the role was his reaction to the screenplay. It was quite simple. It started and ended with those words.”
Those words were written by The First’s co-creator and showrunner Beau Willimon, best known for huge Netflix hit House Of Cards. Yet The First hardly follows in that show’s dark footsteps; after four seasons of political chicanery and
murderous cynicism, Willimon had, says Tappis, “a desire to tell a story that didn’t involve violence and guns”. The First “is about the best of humanity and focuses on what can happen when people work their hardest and act their best in order to achieve something greater than themselves.”
One of those people is Penn’s character, former NASA astronaut Tom Hagerty, whose precise role remains spoiler-resistantly obscured (Tappis “cannot confirm nor deny” whether he heads boldly into space, or remains as one of the ground crew). Yet it’s clear Hagerty is a romantic, who expounds the wonders of witnessing the aurora borealis from space in the teaser trailer, and also a man whose journey is complicated by his love for his daughter, Denise (Anna Jacobi Haren). “The show is about the first mission to Mars, but told through the relationship of the father and daughter,” reveals Tappis. “At some point Tom has to make a very difficult decision that forces him to choose between his lifelong ambition and his responsibility as a father. It’s a moral dilemma that all of us on some level can understand.”
There are shades of Interstellar in Willimon’s new show, which also shares that movie’s rigorous attention to scientific detail (“Everything’s rooted in existing science and forecasted models,” Tappis insists). Which isn’t to say we’ll have seen it all before — even following Ron Howard’s recent take on the topic for National Geographic with 2016’s Mars. After all, Willimon and Tappis got Sean Penn to do TV. In that sense, at least, their show is definitely ‘the first’.