We’re starting to think there might be some black magic at play in the trudge to get Devil in the White City firmly off the ground. If we cast our minds all the way back to August of this year, Keanu Reeves had been confirmed to star in the limited series, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese as executive producers. But according to Variety, this week Reeves has stepped away from the role, with director Todd Field hot on his heels straight after.
Adapted from Erik Larson’s non-fiction book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, the series has been in production limbo for well over a decade since DiCaprio purchased the rights to the book in 2010. Scorsese was set to direct a film with his Wolf of Wall Street star as the lead, but that never came to fruition. Since then, the property has changed hands, directors, producers and mediums until finally, in 2019, a series adaptation was announced for Paramount TV via Hulu. The story follows the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 Chicago, and how Daniel Burnham, an architect who designed the expo, intersected with the serial killer H. H. Holmes, who supposedly lured his victims into his “Murder House” during the Chicago fair. An easy win, surely? After all, people love two things: architecture and murder.
Reeves was set to star as Burnham in the eight-episode series, but so far there’s no confirmation about why he’s decided to walk away from the project. While most of our prestige film actors of the past 30 years have been making TV their playground for some time now, Devil in the White City would have been Reeve’s first major role on the small screen. Much like Reeves, director Todd Field, who has recently been picking up Oscar buzz for his latest film Tár with Cate Blanchett, has seemingly offered no public explanation for why he’s decided to step down.
The show is set to air in 2024, which hopefully gives plenty of time for production to find a new director and leading star. You know, just tiny details. Maybe they should do an exorcism of some kind beforehand though, just in case.
