For a full decade, Harry Potter fanatics watched the film series' cast grow from squeaky-voiced kids to adults. Daniel Radcliffe took several career detours to ensure people remember him for more than boy wizardry - full-frontal nudity and playing a farting corpse will do that kind of thing - and it looks like Rupert Grint's new TV role will take him about as far away from Ron Weasley-ness as can be. Grint signed on as a lead in the TV adaptation of Guy Ritchie's comedic caper Snatch, which also added Gossip GIrl's Ed Westwick and Hemlock Grove's Dougray Scott.
While Ron Weasley was the talent-lacking best friend and sidekick to the protagonist, Rupert Grint's upcoming character sounds like he'll be closer to the center of the story. In Crackle's Snatch, he'll play Charlie Cavendish, a criminal who seems to thrive on unpredictable impulses, which doesn't always work to his favor. But he's got a bright and captivating personality, as well as an extremely posh sense of style, so it isn't hard to understand why people keep working with him.
While not a direct retelling of the calamitous diamond heist from Guy Ritchie's 2000 film, the small screen version of Snatch will exist in basically the same universe. Based on a real heist, the story will center on a group of twentysomething gents on the rise in the criminal underworld who luck out - or so they think - when they discover a truck filled with stolen gold bullion. This is their ticket into the world they were aiming for but might not like so much, populated with crooked cops, gypsy brawlers, international gangsters and other assorted n'er-do-wells.
Last seen in the super-short-lived ABC drama Wicked City, Ed Westwick joins Snatch in a regular guest star role. He will play Sonny Castillo, the owner of a night club, according to Deadline. Dougray Scott, who gave a memorable appearance in the first half of Fear the Walking Dead Season 2, will be around as a series regular. As Vic Hill, Scott will play a prison inmate who doesn't let a silly thing like being incarcerated keep him from the criminal life he knows so well.
Snatch is being developed for TV by Alex De Rakoff, best known feature-wise for directing 2009's crime thriller Dead Man Running and perhaps best known overall for directing the video games Grand Theft Auto 2 and Need for Speed: The Run. The first season will get 10 episodes, and it'll hopefully deliver the same kind of quality that Crackle's growing slate of original programming has offered up so far.
This isn't the first time Rupert Grint has lined up a TV project here in the states. (He appeared on American Dad, but that's not what we're talking about.) He had a mystery comic book thing happening, which fell through, and then he had a pilot for a comedy with My Name is Earl and Raising Hope creator Greg Garcia, but that fell through, too. He does have the crazy cool upcoming U.K. comedy Sick Note, which also stars Nick Frost and Don Johnson, so we'll have a double dose of small-screen Rupert Grint a year from now, give or take some months.
Find Grint, Westwick and Scott on Snatch when it debuts on Crackle in 2017. To see when everything is coming to TV later this year, check out our fall TV schedule.
