As reported by Deadline, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery has been cast as the female lead in Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank’s Netflix Western Godless. She’ll be playing a woman named Alice Fletcher who owns a range, but that’s pretty much all we know about her. Thankfully, Deadline does have some other information about the series. Along with Dockery, it’ll also star Jeff Daniels and Jack O’Connell as a “menacing outlaw” and his former partner, with O’Connell hiding out at the aforementioned ranch and Daniels ending up in a “quiet town” that is “mysteriously made up of entirely women.”
Now, that premise is a lot more complicated than just saying “it’s a Western,” but it’s intriguing at least. Does it mean that the women in this town got together and kicked out/murdered all of the troublemakers (i.e. men), and now live in a crime-free paradise that is being threatened by Jeff Daniels’ boorish ways? And does that make O’Connell’s character the Steve Trevor to Dockery’s Wonder Woman? Or are we overthinking this, and Godless is just going to be a show about some cowboy dudes trying to kill each other? We’ll find out when Godless premieres on some yet-to-be-determined date.