Oscar winner Tim Robbins to star in HBO's Alan Ball family drama

PanARMENIAN.Net - Tim Robbins is returning to HBO.

The Academy Award winner has been tapped to star in Alan Ball's family drama on the premiere cable network, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

This untitled 10-episode, straight-to-series drama focuses on a contemporary multiracial family: a philosophy professor (Robbins), his lawyer wife (fellow Academy Award winner Holly Hunter), their three adopted children from Somalia (Jerrika Hinton in a guest role), Vietnam (Raymond Lee) and Colombia (Daniel Zovatto), and their sole biological child (Sosie Bacon). The seemingly perfect, progressive family is in actuality harboring deep rifts. Then, one of the children begins to see things others cannot. Is it mental illness or something else? The series is a tragicomic meditation on the complicated forces at work on everyone in America today.

Robbins will star as Greg, a philosophy professor questioning his life, purpose and the world in which he lives — one in which it seems the bad guys have won — and his strained relationship with his wife, Audrey, adds to his overall anxiety.

The casting marks a return for Robbins, who won an Oscar for Mystic River, to HBO after he starred in the premium cable network's comedy The Brink. The series, co-starring Jack Black, was renewed in 2015 for a second season but ultimately scrapped three months later before production resumed. His previous work for HBO includes 2011 TV movie Cinema Verite, for which he earned a Golden Globe. Robbins is repped by ICM Partners.

Robbins' credits include The Shawshank Redemption, Bull Durham, Dead Man Walking and the upcoming feature Marjorie Prime, in which he stars and also serves on as co-producer.

Ball created the drama and will executive produce alongside his Your Face Goes Here banner topper, Peter Macdissi. The project marks the fifth collaboration for Ball with HBO and its sibling cabler, Cinemax, following Six Feet Under, True Blood and Banshee. He next exec produces the Oprah Winfrey TV movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.