Deadline is reporting that Jurassic Park and Event Horizon star Sam Neill—who currently leads the cast of the BBC’s historical drama Peaky Blinders—has signed on to star in a new American Western series for AMC. Neill will star as Eli, the stern family patriarch looming over The Son, which hopes to chart the “epic tale of the story of America’s birth as a superpower, through the bloody rise and fall of one Texas family.”
Kidnapped by a Comanche Native American tribe as a child, Eli employs the “brutal Comanche worldview” to his business dealings, a premise that kind of sounds like a cross between The Searchers and There Will Be Blood, only with even more AMC-mandated antiheroes. The multi-generational story will track Eli’s rise to power, followed by his attempts to pass on his legacy on to his family, including co-star Henry Garrett as the character’s son, Pete, and Sydney Lucas as a strong-willed female descendant of the clan. Zahn McClarnon—a.k.a. Fargo’s enigmatic Hanzee—is also set to appear, as the war chief who kidnaps Eli as a boy.