Latest in Tony McNamara

In 2008, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Tony McNamara staged a play at the Sydney Theatre Company revolving around Catherine the Great. As he wrote a potential film adaptation, he began to realize how massive the story actually was and decided it would work better as a series. In 2018, The Great was greenlit at Hulu and…

Tony McNamara, creator of Hulu series The Great, is staying in the Disney family. The writer has signed an overall deal with ABC Signature. The two-year deal will see him develop and supervise projects for the Disney Television Studios division. It comes after the streamer renewed his MRC-produced Catherine The Great…

Hulu has unveiled a trailer for the second season of its acclaimed comedy, The Great, which debuts on the streamer on November 19. The series created by The Favourite scribe Tony McNamara charts the rise of Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) from outsider to the longest-reigning female ruler in Russia's history, with…

On Friday, the creators and stars of The Great stopped by TCA to tease the second season of their acclaimed Hulu comedy, which is set to premiere on November 19. Creator, writer and EP Tony McNamara, EP Marian Macgowan, and EP-actor Nicholas Hoult were joined on the panel by EP-actor Elle Fanning, who touched on a…

No surprise here: Disney is capitalizing on last weekend’s success of Cruella in theaters and on Disney+ Premier, with a sequel already in the works with the pic’s director Craig Gillespie and writer Tony McNamara looking to team again. Said a Disney spokesperson, "We are very pleased with Cruella's box office…

As a playwright and screenwriter, Tony McNamara was never particularly interested in scripting the period piece. The irony is, of course, that he's spent the last several years doing so, and it's these projects specifically that have brought his career to new heights. Between Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite and his…

When it came to playing the hijinks of Russian empress visionary Catherine the Great and her buffoon husband Peter III in Hulu and MRC’s period series The Great, Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult “threw out the history books.” More specifically, rather than have their performances become bogged down by all the…

While promoting his Oscar-nominated work on 2018's The Favourite, writer Tony McNamara expressed a dissatisfaction with period drama. Industry insiders were surprised, then, when his follow-up project turned out to be Hulu's The Great, a darkly comic satire charting the rise of Catherine the Great from outsider to the…

On the first Crew Call podcast of the Emmy season we speak with Oscar nominated The Favorite screenwriter Tony McNamara about his new Hulu/Media Rights Capital series The Great which follows Elle Fanning as 18th Century Empress of Russia Catherine the Great as she carefully plots a coup d’etat to take down her boorish…

The czar’s arranged bride tells him how they can move Russia forward “together.” He stands, frowns and reminds her, “No, I rule — you serve!” In the next scene in the first full trailer for Hulu’s cheeky dramedy The Great, he is told, “Your queen is unhappy.” But should she die for that? Said queen is Catherine the…

EXCLUSIVE: As screenwriter Tony McNamara landed in London this past weekend to make good on his BAFTA nomination for writing The Favourite with Deborah Davis, he was already having a pretty ‘Great’ weekend. On Friday he found out his new TV show The Great, about the life of Catherine the Great of Russia would be…

A visionary director who had written or co-written each of his films since starting out in 1995, Yorgos Lanthimos changed tack with his latest effort, The Favourite, collaborating with screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, for his first period piece. While the auteur is famously uncompromising in his work…