Emma Stone and Jonah Hill Star in First Teaser for Cary Fukunaga Netflix Series ‘Maniac’
If Justin Theroux promised he could cure all your problems if you agreed to pop a few pills, would you refuse? I mean, it’s Justin Theroux, how could you say no?
That’s the general idea behind Netflix’s new limited series Maniac from The Leftovers writer Patrick Somerville and directed by True Detective alum Cary Fukunaga. A remake of the 2014 Norwegian series of the same name from Hakon Bast Mossige and Espen PA Lervaag (which you can stream on Netflix now), this version follows a mind-bending pharmaceutical trial gone wrong, because what could possibly go wrong when a doc promises to fix you with mysterious drugs!
Emma Stone and Jonah Hill play two people who are lured to a three-day drug trial by Theroux’s Dr. James K. Mantleray (OK, maybe don’t trust Theroux with a name like that), who promises to cure their mental ailments. The first teaser trailer shows Stone and Hill sitting across from each other in a room flooded with color as Theroux speaks in an eerie meditational voiceover. It certainly gives off trippy Legion vibes. Here’s the full synopsis:
Set in a world somewhat like our world, in a time quite similar to our time, Maniac tells the stories of Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), two strangers drawn to the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial, each for their own reasons. Annie’s disaffected and aimless, fixated on broken relationships with her mother and her sister; Owen, the fifth son of wealthy New York industrialists, has struggled his whole life with a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. Neither of their lives have turned out quite right, and the promise of a new, radical kind of pharmaceutical treatment—a sequence of pills its inventor, Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), claims can repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak—draws them and ten other strangers to the facilities of Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech for a three-day drug trial that will, they’re assured, with no complications or side-effects whatsoever, solve all of their problems, permanently. Things do not go as planned.
The 10-episode limited series, which also stars Sally Field, Jemima Kirke, Julia Garner, and Sonoya Mizuno, will arrive on Netflix September 21.
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