One day after our exclusive that the Jimmy Olsen series is being developed as a mockumentary “superhero Spinal Tap”, Deadline reports Jimmy Tatro — the star of Netflix’s American Vandal — is in talks to play Gorilla Grodd in the show.
Sources close to production tell the trade it’s a “major role,” with Deadline noting the news arrives “before the Jimmy Olsen series has officially received a greenlight.” HBO Max and DC Studios declined to comment.
The trade is still billing the project as “DC Crime” — a title James Gunn flatly denied ever existed (“It is not and has never been called DC Crime”) — and describes it as “akin to a true-crime docuseries” with Jimmy Olsen hosting. Olsen is played by Skyler Gisondo in Superman, who’s expected to reprise the role. Season 1 reportedly centers on Grodd.
American Vandal creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault write, executive produce, and showrun, with Gunn and Peter Safran EPing, Galen Vaisman overseeing for DC Studios, and Warner Bros. Television producing.
Tatro was most recently seen in Scream 7; his credits include The Real Bros of Simi Valley, The Hawk, Modern Family, Home Economics — and, yes, American Vandal.
American Vandal With A Cape — Literally
The true-crime format itself isn’t news.
When the series was first announced back in November, Variety already described it as “a fictional true crime series set in the DC Universe,” a docuseries hosted by Jimmy Olsen, with Season 1 focused on Grodd.
The open question was always the tone: played straight, or full comedy.
That’s what our insiders answered yesterday, that it’s a mockumentary conceived by Gunn alongside the showrunners, fake-doc cameras following Superman’s pal around Metropolis.
“American Vandal with a cape,” as we put it, with one insider calling it a “superhero Spinal Tap.”
Casting Tatro is that answer with a face on it. Yacenda and Perrault are in talks with the actual star of American Vandal.
Tatro played Dylan Maxwell, the burnout at the center of that show’s fake investigation. Now he’d be the telepathic gorilla at the center of this one, presumably a voice and performance-capture gig, and you can already see the pitch: Grodd giving deadpan sit-down interviews from a Belle Reve cell while Jimmy’s crew cuts to the archival footage.
Tatro is also already in business with the American Vandal camp at HBO: last year he teamed with the show’s showrunner, Dan Lagana, and A24 on the HBO comedy Lifties.
So when the rumor we covered last week said casting was zeroing in on comedic actors to voice Grodd — with production set for Atlanta from late August through October — Tatro checks every box on the sheet.
Grodd, DC’s Would-Be Conqueror, Gets The Comedy Treatment
Grodd isn’t a gag character. He’s a “hyper-intelligent telepathic ape who has sought to rule both the simian and human worlds,” per DC’s own description, created in 1959, a career-long menace to The Flash, and already established in DCU continuity via Creature Commandos.
Casting the comedy bro from American Vandal tells you exactly what register this lands in. The DCU keeps moving in one direction: smaller and jokier.
Supergirl just showed at the box office what audiences think of that direction, and the answer coming back from DC Studios is a talking-gorilla mockumentary.
Casting A Show That Hasn’t Been Greenlit — A Week Before The Merger
Here’s the part worth sitting with: Deadline itself notes there’s no official greenlight.
Yet Safran already let slip the show starts shooting this year — “I probably shouldn’t have said that” — the Atlanta dates point to cameras rolling by the end of August, and now DC is closing a deal on a lead.
So DC Studios is staffing up a series that on paper doesn’t exist, with the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger expected to close as soon as next week.
If David Ellison’s new regime goes looking for things to cut, an ungreenlit gorilla mockumentary from the outgoing leadership is exactly where the red pen starts.
And remember what our insiders said about why this show exists in the first place: it was conceived as a facade — Gunn showing he’s developing the universe while the DCU’s big guns sit in limbo.
A famous face circling the gorilla doesn’t change that read. It just gives the facade a casting announcement.
Two Jimmys, one telepathic gorilla, zero greenlight. The DCU, everybody.
