Posted in: Audio Dramas, Preview, TV | Tagged: "Beauty Is Movement", Department Of Midnight, james callis, podcast, warren ellis

James Callis to Star in Warren Ellis' The Department Of Midnight

James Callis is to star in Department Of Midnight, a new audio drama podcast written by Warren Ellis, launching this spring.

The Department Of Midnight is a new audio drama podcast serial starring James Callis, best known for playing Doctor Gaius Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, but also in the Bridget Jones films, Eureka, Castlevania, and Picard. It is written and produced by Warren Ellis, Castlevania writer & writer/co-creator of comic books The Authority, Transmetropolitan, Red, Global Frequency, Strange Kiss, Freakangels, Anna Mercury, No Hero, Doctor Sleepless, and Gravel.

The Department Of Midnight is produced by Kevin Kolde, Fred Seibert, Brian Guicciardo, and Warren Ellis, with casting and voice direction by Meredith Layne. It will tell the story of "haunted scientist Dr. John Carnack is employed as a crash site investigator by the Department Of Experimental Oversight: colloquially known, after the Doomsday Clock that ticks down to 12, as The Department Of Midnight. When a breakthrough, esoteric scientific experiment goes wrong, he's there to find out why and to save who he can. The Department Of Midnight presents six stories of mad science and otherworldly horror." The podcast drama will be released this Spring.

In his most recent newsletter, Ellis gave The Department Of Midnight a discussion code name Project Writtle 1. He states, "I can't tell you how delighted I am to be working with so many of my CASTLEVANIA comrades again. (If you're not aware, Meredith Layne was the casting and voice director on all four seasons.)"

Previously, writing about the project – and his personal codename – Ellis wrote, "Writtle is a village about twenty miles away from me.  It's famous.  It's famous for Two Emma Toc.  Two Emma Toc was the world's first regular radio broadcast, beamed out from a hut in Writtle run by the Marconi team. The success of 2MT led to the creation of 2LO, the London station, which led in turn to the creation of the BBC.  Writtle is the birthplace of radio as we know it today. Being a man of a certain age and background, I grew up listening to BBC radio. From music to news to audio drama.  I was right there for Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the serious drama radio plays, the weird fringe series like Earthsearch on a Sunday morning.  I always wanted to write for radio.  Never worked out how to do that (I've never had representation in the UK).  And then audiobook companies started to move into originals, and I wanted to be in that, but never worked out how.  Writing for audio was going to stay in the bucket. And then someone dropped this lunatic opportunity at my feet, and I immediately threw a net over it.  And then I'm pretty sure I just shrieked for a couple of hours.  And then we got to work."

"'Project Writtle' is a slate of audio drama podcast series created and written by me.  Titles, collaborators, and other details to be announced soon. Do I know how to write audio drama?  Of course not. And I sat with this for a while, trying to figure out the approach.  Until I realised I had a huge chunk of the form already. On 'Castlevania,' we recorded the actors before we had the animation or storyboards because we wanted the actors to be able to originate complete performances without putting artificial boundaries on them.  So when we recorded a bunch of actors together, before anything in the show besides the script and the character designs existed…. we were making a form of audio drama. And so now you know why I've been revisiting 'Castlevania' scripts here, too."

In June 2020, the website SoManyOfUs.com collected and collated dozens of accusations of grooming young women by the comic book writer Warren Ellis over the past two decades. Further coverage saw them record even more, over a hundred. In the wake of this news, and despite the site stating they did not want Warren to be "cancelled" but to learn, a number of projects (but not all) dropped Ellis as a contributor, or he pulled out. In February 2022, Warren Ellis relaunched his Orbital Operations newsletter from a new provider, Button Down, in which he linked to the So Many Of Us update and website. There have, however, been no updates for some time.

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