'Lioness' Already Sounds Like a Massive Hit
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Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan must never sleep. He’s currently working on at least seven different series for Paramount+, landing A-list actors without even showing them scripts, and now taking over showrunner duties for his next big venture, Lioness. The upcoming series, which just added Nicole Kidman, Zoe Saldaña, and Morgan Freeman to its cast, will reportedly follow three CIA agents who attempt to bring down a terrorist organization from within.
Back in June, Sheridan took over as showrunner after Thomas Brady (Hell on Wheels) left the project citing creative differences. The writer's room had already wrapped, and production was slated to start in September, when Sheridan—who also created the idea for Lioness—decided to step in and finish the series himself. Meanwhile, Sheridan also has many series in production, such as the fifth season of Yellowstone, Yellowstone prequel 1923, the Jeremy Renner-starring Mayor of Kingstown, the mob drama Tulsa King with Sylvester Stallone, an upcoming drama titled Land Man with Billy Bob Thornton, and plans for a Bass Reeves series starring David Oyelowo. Where does he find the time?
Though there’s no release date set for Lioness just yet, here’s everything we know about the highly anticipated Paramount+ series.
Who Will Star in Lioness?
Laysla De Oliveira (Locke & Key) will star as Cruz Manuelos, a young Marine who is recruited into the CIA’s Lioness Engagement Team to help bring down a dangerous terrorist organization. Zoe Saldaña will play a character named Joe, who will be Manuelos’s station chief in charge of training the female operatives. Above them both is Nicole Kidman’s Kaitlyn Meade, who is described by Paramount as: “the CIA’s Senior Supervisor who has had a long career of playing the politics game. She must juggle the trappings of being a woman in the high-ranking intelligence community, a wife that longs for the attention she herself can’t even give and a mentor to someone veering suspiciously close to the same rocky road she’s found herself on.”
The rest of the cast is stacked as well. Recently, Deadline reported that the great Morgan Freeman will be joining as the show's Secretary of State Edwin Mullins. The cast also includes Jill Wagner, Dave Annable, LaMonica Garrett, James Jordan, Austin Hébert, Hannah Love Lanier, Stephanie Nur, and Jonah Wharton, according to Variety. Kidman and Saldaña will also serve as executive producers.
Is Lioness Based on a Real CIA Mission?
Yes and no. Paramount promotes that the series is based on a real CIA program, but the Lioness Engagement Team had a bit of a different history during ts time in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the official website of the United States Marine Corps, the Lioness Program was a way for American military personnel to search female insurgents that they believed could be smuggling contraband. “Since Muslim tradition does not allow a man to touch a woman who is not related to them and knowing American military personnel would not search them unless a female service member was present, insurgents began to use women to smuggle contraband,” Lance Cpl. Nicholas M. Dunn explains on the website. “To counter this threat, the Marine Corps developed the Lioness Program, which was formed [in 2004] to provide culturally-sensitive searches on Iraqi women.”
The "Lionesses" in the upcoming series seem to be serving as undercover operatives—embedding themselves into terrorist organizations to gather intel and destroy them from the inside—and not checkpoint TSA. But hey, that’s showbiz, baby! Whatever Sheridan and co. are cooking up sounds a lot more exciting.
"I'm looking forward to just meeting the cast, from Nicole to Laysla and the rest of the cast," Saldaña told People in an interview for her Netflix series From Scratch. "I feel like this is going to be just as challenging [as From Scratch], just as emotionally compromising, but in its own unique way."
When Will Lioness Premiere?
No release date has been set for Lioness just yet, especially as Sheridan focuses on 1923 and the upcoming release of Mayor of Kingstown’s second season. The series began production just this past September, however, meaning that we could see a release date either in late 2023 or sometime in 2024. Until then, there’s still plenty of Sheridan’s projects at Paramount+ to keep viewers occupied.
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