Tim Roth will replace Ian McShane in the Australian drama series “Last King of the Cross” for the Paramount+ service. McShane reportedly withdrew due to health concerns.
Inspired by John Ibrahim’s best-selling autobiography, the operatic story tracks Ibrahim’s rise from a poverty-stricken immigrant with no education, no money, and no prospects, to Australia’s most infamous nightclub mogul in Sydney’s Kings Cross – a half a mile strip with every form of criminality on offer.
Roth will play Ezra Shipman, the reigning King of The Cross who for three generations was Sydney’s most feared man with his hands in gambling, prostitution, and strip joints.
Now confronting his looming mortality and no-one to leave it to, he embraces an adolescent facsimile of himself in the form of the young, brash, ambitious, and intelligent John (Lincoln Younes). Ezra takes the young man into his inner circle as his acolyte… but who is exploiting who?
Callan Mulvey, Tess Haubrich, Claude Jabbour, Maria Tran, Matt Nable and Damian Walshe-Howling co-star. Mark Fennessy and Karl Zwicky produce while Kieran Darcy-Smith will direct. Filming is currently taking place in and around Sydney.
Source: Deadline
