Chloë Sevigny, Alice Braga, Grammy-winning rapper Kid Cudi, Jack Dylan Grazer and Tom Mercier, who made a splash as the lead of Berlin Golden Bear-winner Synonymes, are among the key cast announced by HBO for Luca Guadagnino’s first TV series, We Are Who We Are.
The Call Me by Your Name director is set to start shooting this month on the eight-part HBO-Sky original, which centers on a group of American teenagers living on a U.S. military base in Italy.
Other cast members with main roles are singer-songwriter Jordan Kristine Seamon, actor Spence Moore II (“Five Points”), Corey Knight (“Nobodies,” “Not Black Enough”), Francesca Scorsese, Sebastiano Pigazzi, and Ben Taylor, who are all young U.S. artists. British stage actress Faith Alabi also stars.
Guadagnino is serving as showrunner and director on We Are Who We Are, which HBO described as a coming-of-age story about two American youths that looks at “friendship, first love and all the unknowns of being a teenager.” The cabler added that it “could happen anywhere, but in this case, happens to be in this little slice of America in Italy.”
The lead characters are two 14-year-olds, a boy and a girl named Fraser Wilson and Caitlin Harper. The two become close amid their posse of teenage friends, who think they’re a couple. But Fraser is experiencing confusing feelings about his identity and develops an innocent romantic connection with an older soldier.
Production was meant to start earlier but ran into a snag when the U.S. Defense Department refused permission to shoot at the Caserma Ederle U.S. military base in Vicenza, northern Italy, after reading the script, sources said. That forced shooting to relocate to a former center for migrants in Padua, which has become a stand-in for the U.S. army base.
We Are Who We Are is being produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani for Wildside, with international sales handled by Wildside’s parent company, Fremantle.
