Bill Murray joins HBO miniseries adaptation of Olive Kitteridge 

This year, Bill Murray made an unexpected TV appearance with a cameo in Garry Trudeau’s Amazon pilot for Alpha House. Now, according to Deadline, he’s been cast in another television project: HBO’s four-hour miniseries adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulizter Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Frances McDormand optioned the novel before its publication five years ago, shepherding the project through production at HBO with The Kids Are All Right director Lisa Cholodenko, and a cast that includes Richard Jenkins, Rosemarie DeWitt, The Newsroom's John Gallagher Jr., Ruby Sparks' Zoe Kazan, and Friday Night Lights/Breaking Bad's Jesse Plemons. McDormand stars as the titular junior high math teacher, the de facto protagonist in a sweeping, interlaced series of narratives about the citizens of a coastal town in Maine. Murray will play “Jack Kennison, a local widower whom Kitteridge befriends.” It’s a minor character in the novel, but depending on how the miniseries divides up the stories, Murray may appear in multiple episodes.