After a few months of radio silence, it was recently announced that Bryan Fuller’s highly anticipated small screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods would premiere on Starz on Sunday, April 30 at 9:00 P.M. Before that, though, the show will receive its world premiere at this month’s SXSW festival, and in anticipation of its debut, we now have a new batch of images, spotlighting some of the old and new Gods that we’ll be formally introduced to next month.
The story mainly focuses on an ex-con named Shadow Moon and his mysterious boss Mr. Wednesday, but while embarking on their journey this mismatched pair will meet a variety of weird and wonderful characters that will both aid and hinder their progress.
In addition to new looks at the likes of Shadow, Wednesday and Laura, the stills provide first glimpses of Old Gods Low Key Lysmith (Jonathan Tucker), Easter (Kristin Chenoweth) and Bilquis (Yetide Badaki), and the New God known as Mr. World (Crispin Glover).
Star Ricky Whittle (Shadow) explained a little about these powerful, but greatly diminished deities in a recent interview, saying the following:
These are real gods with real-world problems — they’re struggling in life as people have lost their faith and belief. These guys are living amongst us and living ordinary lives. That allows even the most skeptical people who maybe aren’t into fantasy to really get into this show.
Because there’s only one novel (not counting the Anansi Boys spinoff), fans have been curious about how many seasons of American Gods we’ll see. Right now, it’s difficult to say, but the show has already added a few characters that didn’t appear in the source material (including Corbin Bernsen’s Vulcan), so there’s a decent chance they’re planning to expand the mythology beyond the book.
Time will tell, but either way, we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what Starz has done with American Gods when it premieres next month.