DC’s ungreenlit gorilla mockumentary just landed its female lead.
Deadline reports Mary Holland (Ghosts, Netflix’s The Little House on the Prairie) has closed a deal for the female lead in DC Studios’ Jimmy Olsen Superman spinoff series at HBO Max, playing a character named Sandra. That name is all the trade’s production sources are giving up on the role, and both HBO Max and DC Studios declined to comment.
She joins Jimmy Tatro, who closed his own deal last month to officially play Gorilla Grodd, the Season 1 villain.
More Comedy DNA For The ‘Superhero Spinal Tap’
Holland is a comedy hire through and through: an Upright Citizens Brigade vet who came up on the Wild Horses improv team alongside Lauren Lapkus, co-wrote and starred in Happiest Season, and currently haunts CBS’s Ghosts as Patience the Puritan ghost. She’s already in the DC fold, too, voicing characters on HBO Max’s Harley Quinn animated series.
Which tracks, because the series — which surfaced under the working title DC Crime — is the true-crime mockumentary hosted by Skyler Gisondo’s Daily Planet photographer, with Season 1 built around Tatro’s Grodd, the telepathic ape created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino in 1959 and already seeded into DCU continuity via Creature Commandos.
American Vandal creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault write, executive produce, and showrun, with James Gunn and Peter Safran EPing, Galen Vaisman overseeing for DC Studios, and Warner Bros. Television producing.
That’s the exact format our insiders described as a “weird superhero Spinal Tap” — and, per those same insiders, a facade conceived to show development activity while the DCU’s big guns idle. First the American Vandal creators cast their own mockumentary star as the villain; now the female lead is a UCB improv lifer. Every hire doubles down on the tone.
Female Lead Locked, Still No Greenlight
When Deadline confirmed Tatro three weeks ago, the trade spelled out that HBO had yet to officially greenlight the series. Tonight’s report doesn’t say that’s changed, and the network declining to comment again says plenty.
Meanwhile, Safran already let slip the show shoots this year — “I probably shouldn’t have said that” — with cameras reported for Atlanta from late August through October. That’s weeks away.
So the ledger now reads: villain officially cast, female lead officially cast, a production window about to open, and a $110 billion merger frozen in court above it all — with still no greenlight anyone will say out loud.
The gorilla is official. The female lead is official. The show still isn’t.
Beyond Ghosts and Netflix’s The Little House on the Prairie, Holland’s credits include Apple’s The Big Door Prize, Senior Year, Nightbitch, and Netflix’s The Woman in the House, and she is currently in production on Amplify Pictures’ The Earliest Show.
