The already excellent casting on Amazon’s upcoming Neil Gaiman adaptation, Good Omens, just got a little bit gooder, with Variety reporting that recent Oscar-winner Frances McDormand has signed on to play the voice of God in the end-of-the-world comedy/drama. Gaiman made the announcement today himself, at the show’s panel at Comic-Con, noting that it came about in a particularly strange way:
We knew God would be a woman. We were talking about great American actresses, because we wanted her to have an American voice. And out the blue one day I got an email from Frances McDormand asking to borrow my house in Scotland.
And while we have to assume that most big Hollywood jobs do not come about because Frances McDormand wants to randomly borrow people’s houses, it does seem like a good stroke of luck for the series, which will also star folks like Miranda Richardson, Jon Hamm, Nick Offerman, and Michael Sheen and David Tennant as bickering angel-demon pairing Aziraphale and Crowley.
Good Omens is based off of the 1990 book co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the late author of the beloved Discworld books. Gaiman paid tribute to his old colleague during the panel, noting that the hardest thing about writing the series was “the absence of Terry Pratchett from this world.”