EXCLUSIVE: Swiss creator Katja Meier made headlines earlier this year when she said she had been shocked by demands to make the female protagonist of her new show “20 years younger.”
Meier ignored the requests and pushed on with $hare and we can reveal she has just landed Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn as EP.
Seehorn viewed $hare at the recent SeriesFest in Denver, Meier tells us, and approached her with a view to getting involved with the series after it won SeriesFest’s Rural Intersectionality Fund award. The pilot is now available on independent streamer Olyn and a series is in pre-production. “I didn’t want the pilot to end when I saw it. I wanted to follow each of these characters wherever they went,” said Seehorn.
Meier told The Guardian in January that having made it onto the UK arm of the well known Writers Lab program, which is backed by the likes of Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, she was repeatedly asked by production companies to make her protagonist younger, a demand she disregarded, instead hiring German Film Award nominee Victoria Trauttmansdorff (Gegenüber).
Trauttmansdorff plays 59-year-old Lena Corbyn, who inherits part of a British-Swiss mining empire and sets out to revolutionize it by closing a harmful coal mine while her wealthy family fights back to protect the status quo. The female-led production team shot the pilot on a winter campsite near St. Moritz in Switzerland.
Victoria Trauttmansdorff as Lena Corbyn in ‘$hare’.
“We’re independent filmmakers and storytellers who create our own opportunities,” said Meier. “We didn’t wait for permission – we just went out and made the female- powered story we wanted to see on screen.”
Seehorn is an EP on the upcoming series. She played Kim Wexler in AMC hit Better Call Saul, for which she was nominated for two Emmys, and has also appeared in Veep and Bad Boys: Ride or Die. She recently joined the ensemble cast of indie hostage thriller Eleven Days opposite Taylor Kitsch, Diego Luna and Jason Isaacs.
$hare also stars Dulcie Smart. Delia Mayer (Unorthodox) is director and DoP is Isabelle Simmen.