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Move over Jack Reacher, there’s a new brilliant-but-burly mystery-solver coming to Prime Video.
After three film adaptations, James Patterson’s famed D.C. detective Alex Cross comes to life on the small screen, portrayed by Aldis Hodge (Black Adam).
The titular character is a detective and forensic psychologist, uniquely capable of digging into the psyches of killers and their victims, in order to identify — and ultimately capture — the murderers. Hodge also serves as a producer, while Ben Watkins (Burn Notice) is the showrunner and executive producer.
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“I had this sense that he’d be able to bring some swagger, some sex appeal, some edge,” Watkins told Entertainment Weekly of his leading man. “But also, I needed someone who was voracious intellectually.”
“I saw a lot of things personally that I would like to embody but also as an audience member, Things that I wanted to watch,” Hodge added. “I saw a character that was cool, calm, collected, imposing. He was smart, ethical, but had that edge.”
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Cross is the star of 32 Patterson novels that span 30 years, beginning with 1993’s Along Came a Spider. That, and its 1995 sequel Kiss the Girls, were adapted into films starring Morgan Freeman as the detective, with Kiss the Girls premiering in 1997 and Along Came a Spider in 2001. Then in 2012, Tyler Perry took over the mantle in Alex Cross, based on the 2006 novel Cross.
For the TV series, Watkins wanted to remain more faithful to the novels than the films had been.
“When I started down the rabbit hole of reading the books and I rewatched the films, I was making a list of the things that I felt like the films hadn’t done justice to,” Watkins explained. That included using Washington, D.C., as the backdrop, Alex grappling with the murder of his wife, cutting to the villain’s POV, and Alex’s lifelong best friend John Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa).
“If you’ve only watched the movies, you wouldn’t know [about Sampson],” Watkins said. “Then you get into the books and you’re like, ‘This relationship is so layered and so rewarding and so nuanced and comforting.’ They’re inseparable, and you know you can count on that. I knew that that was one of the things we were going to have to channel for the show.”
Juanita Jennings, Alona Tal, Samantha Walkes, Caleb Elijah, Melody Hurd, Jennifer Wigmore, Eloise Mumford, and Ryan Eggold co-star. All eight episodes of Cross drop Nov. 14 on Prime Video. Check out the trailer below.
