The trailer for Black Bird is here, and with it comes our first look at the late Ray Liotta’s final completed television series. The Apple TV+ miniseries is a chilling crime thriller written and executive produced by bestselling author Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River).
Liotta’s is the first voice we hear in the trailer, counseling his imprisoned son Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton) that there will be no “quick” way out of his 10-year sentence. But the former high school football star is given a critical choice: stay and serve his time with no chance at parole, or transfer to a maximum security facility “specializing in the criminally insane” and befriend a possible serial killer, Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser).
Jimmy has to move carefully to get a confession out of Hall, as prison is famously unkind to snitches. Plus, Hall is creepy as hell (to put it lightly), and Jimmy only has so much time to discover where he may have buried the bodies of several young girls. “Hall’s conviction’s on appeal. He could win and walk,” says Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi) in the trailer. “If he walks, he’ll kill again and again.”
Following Liotta’s death, Lehane wrote in a tribute that the Goodfellas star’s involvement in the project was “the culmination of a lifelong dream” for the author, calling him “the most electric American actor of his generation.”
“I wrote the part of Big Jim Keene in Black Bird for Ray,” he wrote. “I had no other actor in mind and was floored—humbled, honored, fist-pump elated—when he leapt at playing the part less than 24 hours after we sent him the scripts. And the performance he gave? It was a master class.”
He added that “as deeply flawed and compromised as the character is, Ray found the nobility in a man who would run into a burning building for that same son and never break his stride. It was that duality I counted on to carry the emotional heart of our show from beginning to end.”
Black Bird, which was inspired by the true crime memoir In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, also stars Greg Kinnear. The series premieres on Apple TV+ on July 8.
