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Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Invincible' Season 4 Is Bringing in Matthew Rhys for a Major Role
Congo lining up off of Prime Video's announcement that Invincible will have its fifth season queued up while its fourth season is waiting in the wings, Skybound Entertainment announced new casting for the adult animated series that'll play a major role in its upcoming season at San Diego Comic-Con. During Invincible co-creator Robert Kirkman's panel at San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that actor Matthew Rhys (The Americans) will play the role of Dinosaurus. To all the folks who didn't have the privilege of being in attendance at SDCC to witness the announcement firsthand, the official Invincible X/Twitter account had folks covered with a post showcasing what the character looks like… like a red dinosaur. Admincible can now confirm Matthew Rhys is voicing Dinosaurus!!! And here's a first look at the character design. Source: trust me bro. Actual source: @RobertKirkman's SDCC panel happening now. — INVINCIBLE (@InvincibleHQ) July 24, 2025While that sounds like the kind of throwaway villain-of-the-week kind of fodder for Mark Grayson and crew to make short work of in the opening moments of an episode, Dinosaurus plays a pretty crucial role in the comics and thus, in the animated show, as the next major hurdle for Mark to overcome in his coming-of-age superhero mentioned earlier, Dinosaurus isn't just a mindless brute; he's a highly intelligent dinosaur person who quickly befriends Mark. Debuting in issue 68 of the comics, Dinosaurus is as close an analogue to Spider-Man's Lizard character as Invincible characters come. Dinosaurus is a split personality of a human scientist named David Anders. Contrary to rogues like Dr. Seismic, who justify their villainy as the end justifies the means, Anders' primary goal, at least initially, is to use his intelligence to support environmental conservation efforts, which helps him and Grayson become fast friends as he navigates his new role as a hero. What makes Dinosaurus' introduction into Invincible so novel is that it occurs after his previous partnership with Cecil had been irreparably damaged due to their differing ideals about how far one should go in defending humanity. Dinosaurus becomes Mark's closest ally as the looming Vilrumite war grows ever closer. But, as all things Invincible tend to go, Dinosaurus quickly becomes his newest antagonist, putting Mark in yet another moral quandary for the type of hero he wants to be. We'll spare you the meaty details for Dinosaurus' heel turn. Still, as far as Invincible allies turned antagonists go, Dinosaurus is one of, if not the most interesting, characters in the series that forces Mark to confront the gray that exists to be a hero. Hopefully, Rhys' acting chops will enrich the fan-favorite comic book character and ground Invincible's already inspired adaptation writing to new heights when he's introduced properly to the Prime Video series. Invincible Season 4 is in production. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
UPI
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
'Invincible' renewed for Season 5; Matthew Rhys to join cast
1 of 5 | Matthew Rhys, winner of the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for "The Americans," appears backstage during the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2018. He is joining the voice cast of "Invincible" for Season 5. File Photo by Christine Chew/UPI | License Photo July 17 (UPI) -- The adult-animated superhero series Invincible has been renewed for a fifth season and Welsh actor Matthew Rhys will join the cast. Prime Video announced the additional season Thursday. Season 4 will premiere in 2026. The series takes its inspiration from the comic books penned by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley. Walker is a co-creator on the show and Ottley is a contributing creator. "Invincible follows 17-year-old Mark Grayson, as he inherits his father's superpowers and sets out to become Earth's greatest defender, only to discover the job is more challenging than he could have ever imagined," an official synopsis reads. "Everything changes as Mark is forced to face his past, and his future, while discovering how much further he'll need to go to protect the people he loves." The voice cast includes Steven Yeun, Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons, Seth Rogen, Walton Goggins, Gillian Jacobs, Jason Mantzoukas, Zazie Beetz, Grey DeLisle, Zachary Quinto, Chris Diamantopoulos, Ross Marquand, Khary Payton, Andrew Rannells, Kevin Michael Richardson, Ben Schwartz, Clancy Brown, Jay Pharoah, Mark Hamill and Melise Jow. Rhys, 50, is an actor known for playing Kevin Walker on Brothers & Sisters and Philip Jennings on The Americans.
Newsweek
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
'Invincible' Scores Early Season 5 Renewal
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors "Invincible" won't be going away any time soon. In spite of just finishing its third season in March and its Season 4 premiere being months away, "Invincible" has been renewed for Season 5 at Amazon Prime Video. Read More: John Malkovich Cut From 'The Fantastic Four' Additionally it's been announced that Matthew Rhys ("A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," "The Americans") has been added to the voice cast. The titular hero (Steven Yeun) of "Invincible." The titular hero (Steven Yeun) of "Invincible." Amazon Studios We don't know yet who Rhys will voice in "Invincible," but one possibility is the villain Thragg. The ruler of the Viltrum Empire, Thragg is the chief antagonist of the "Invincible" comics and has yet to show up in the series. "Invincible" creator Robert Kirkman previously told Variety that the upcoming Season 4 would feature the screen debut of Grand Regent Thragg, though there's no telling whether or not it will be Rhys voicing the bad guy. "It would certainly be weird if [Thragg] didn't show up in the show," Kirkman said. "I mean, I don't know. It's so tough. Here's what I'll say: He's been cast and he's amazing." While it's good news for "Invincible" that it's received an early Season 5 renewal, it shouldn't be particularly surprising. The show was renewed for its fourth season before Season 3 saw the light of day, and likewise was renewed for Season 3 before Season 2 streamed. It also shouldn't be too surprising considering the show's stellar performance. Season 3 of "Invincible" proved to be Amazon Prime's most watched animation season of all time. The renewal news comes not long after the show's second Emmy nomination, with Steven Yeun nominated for the first time for outstanding character voice-over performance. "Invincible" is based on the comics of the same name. When Mark Grayson, son of the world's most powerful superhero, comes of age his own super powers emerge, and among the challenges he's forced to face is a heritage that's much darker than he ever imagined. Invincible's voice cast includes Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons, Seth Rogen, Walton Goggins, Gillian Jacobs, Melise Jow, Zazie Beetz, Grey DeLisle, Clancy Brown, Zachary Quinto, Chris Diamantopoulos, Ben Schwartz, Khary Payton, Andrew Rannells, Kevin Michael Richardson, Jay Pharoah, Mark Hamill, and Ross Marquand. More Comics: 'Wonder Woman' Reboot Fast-Tracked at DC Studios 'Supergirl' Poster Teases A More Rebellious Superhero
Time Magazine
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Now 'AJLT' Is Just Gaslighting Us About Carrie's Awful Novel
For those of us who have stopped worrying and learned to love And Just Like That, the absurdity of the Sex and the City sequel is part of the fun. Over the course of three seasons, we've guffawed our way through Mr. Big's death by Peloton, basked in the pure cringe of Miranda's romance with Che Diaz, and stanned Charlotte and Harry's dorky The Americans standom. Just a few episodes ago, we indulged shoe-maven-slash-ankle-masochist Carrie's refusal to remove her stilettos at home after incurring the wrath of her downstairs-neighbor-slash-inevitable-love-interest, Duncan Reeves. But in Thursday's seventh episode of Season 3, AJLT crossed the fine line separating the willing suspension of belief from full-on gaslighting. All season, Carrie—a recovering sex columnist, erstwhile podcaster, and sometime memoirist—has been dabbling in historical fiction. Episodes are often framed by Sarah Jessica Parker's voiceover, in a callback to SATC's quippy narration, reading snippets of the novel that mirror her character's own life. They are bad. Which isn't necessarily a problem; as the 'I couldn't help but wonder' meme demonstrates, we all know Carrie is a hack. No, what finally finished me on this subplot was this week's exchange of manuscripts with Duncan, a highbrow biographer. His rhapsodic response to her pages destroys any illusion we might've had that Carrie's stilted prose is an inside joke between the show's writers and its audience. Apparently, we're supposed to believe the novel is good. The episode opens with a distressed Carrie showing up at Duncan's door. 'I hate you,' she tells him. 'Your first chapter is thrilling. It's polished and it's ready to publish and how am I supposed to hand you my work-in-progress now?' But, of course, she finds the courage. And by the time she visits him again, to deliver a (rude) last-minute party invitation, he's devoured it. The verdict: 'It's brilliant.' (I mean, sure, it may well be publishable, given the success of language manglers like Colleen Hoover and E.L. James. Brilliant, though?) 'The opening sentence: 'The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.' It just stopped me dead in my tracks.' (Same. But only because it reminded me of every formulaic 'attention-grabbing' intro from every undergrad creative writing workshop since the beginning of time.) As for the plot? 'The way it flows is so propulsive.' (We wouldn't know; AJLT only gives us the vibey, introspective passages.) Now, maybe Duncan is trying to flatter his way into Carrie's conveniently nearby bed. He seems too prideful for that, though. (That said, his whole deal makes little sense to me. He comes to one of the most expensive, not to mention distracting, cities in the world just because he doesn't know anyone there, to hole up in an overpriced basement and write about Margaret Thatcher? Has this man never heard of renting a cabin in the woods?) Besides, the idea that he'd be lying feels like the kind of 4D-chess plot AJLT typically avoids. So let's assume he's genuine. Could he possibly be correct? We all know art is subjective, after all. So we owe it to Carrie to take a closer look at the most substantial chunks of the novel AJLT has provided to date. Consider the passage we watched her type out in her back garden, during a work session that was soon interrupted by a cavalcade of rats: Sitting in the sunlight, the woman felt the fog of the last few nights lift. She realized her tossing and turning and insecurities were remnants of another time. This is a new house, she reminded herself. A new life. This wasn't her past… It was the present. May, 1846. Here we have several classic elements of bad writing. There's an overreliance on weather as a metaphor for the mood of a protagonist who is, pretentiously, only ever identified as 'the woman.' The thoughts to which Carrie's close third-person narration gives us access are rote exposition masquerading as an internal monologue—one so shallow, it suggests that our nameless heroine is very stupid. Who has to 'remind herself' that her house is new or that, good lord, she's living in not the past but the present? Alas, in the absence of time machines, everyone who's ever walked the earth has been doomed to live in what is, to them, the present. Also: surely there are more eloquent ways to inform the reader that your story is set in May, 1846. Episode 5 featured an even longer excerpt: The woman threw open her windows to let the city in. She could hear the horses coming and going with their carriages, each one bringing an exciting possibility. The unexpected cool breeze on this hot afternoon reminded her that each day need not be an echo of the one before. There are endless adventures to be taken, if she simply dared to decide to take them. Putting one foot in front of the other, she stepped off the expected path and vowed to go wherever a day might take her. So. Another weather metaphor, this one a veritable non sequitur; what does a summer breeze have to do with spontaneity or repetition? For that matter, is a carriage horse more likely to be 'bringing an exciting possibility' than it is to be ferrying mundane deliveries or facilitating neighbors' quotidian routines? Poetic license must be granted to figurative language, but that doesn't mean an analogy can be fully nonsensical. Meanwhile, the final two sentences are painfully inspirational therapy-speak—which would be cringe-worthy enough in a contemporary novel but sound jarringly anachronistic in the context of a 19th century period piece. (To really be pedantic, there's also a verb-tense misalignment that would give a copyeditor nightmares: 'There are endless adventures to be taken, if she simply dared to decide to take them.') I'm going to resist the temptation to dissect every bit of prose we've heard so far. Believe it or not, I am indeed aware that close reading a fictional work of fiction by a fictional writer is a ridiculous way to spend one's limited time in a world with an unlimited supply of real problems. I also realize that Carrie's novel is being used as a framing device, and thus—however shoddy the execution—the unnamed heroine and inapt metaphors exist more to give us access to Carrie's state of mind than to function as an actual story that a person might want to read. And yet, a viewer who is also a reader can only withstand so much literary gaslighting. This week's episode ends with another meaning-free affirmation from the book: 'The woman held on to what she knew to be true,' Parker intones as we see Carrie cradling her cat (do pets have truth values?). Well, if there's one thing this woman knows to be true, it's that Carrie Bradshaw is no great novelist.
Time Magazine
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
'Mr. Robot' Has Only Gotten Better With Time
Starting today, the USA Network drama Mr. Robot is available to stream on Netflix. It's a great time to introduce a new wave of viewers to the series; between 2015 and 2019, it was one of the most prescient, anti-capitalist shows on TV. At the tail end of the network's optimistic 'blue sky' programming era, this was a techno thriller with prestige-drama aspirations, injecting its core character study with trenchant social commentary. But despite creator and showrunner Sam Esmail's success in airing four seasons of his passion project with little intervention from the network, Mr. Robot never quite took off to the same extent as many of its peers, including critical darlings like FX's The Americans and HBO's The Leftovers. Following a universally acclaimed first season, the show got weirder, bolder, and marginally less gripping on an episode-by-episode basis, at least during a polarizing second season that appeared on far fewer year-end 'best TV' lists than the first. Today, though, the show's occasional missteps feel like part of its charm—integral pieces to a grand vision that Esmail executed with confidence. Time will be kind to Mr. Robot; don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Here's what to know before you dive in. What is the show actually about? Rami Malek stars as Elliot Alderson, a young, clinically depressed man working as a cybersecurity engineer at a company called Allsafe. At night, Elliot moonlights as a cyber-vigilante—and his hacking skills attract the attention of one Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), the enigmatic leader of a hacktivist group called fsociety determined to cancel all consumer debt and take down the massive corporation E-Corp (or 'Evil Corp,' as Elliot's brain interprets it). Sounds very Fight Club… Esmail wears his influences on his sleeve, and Fight Club is one particularly obvious one, from the anti-consumerist setup to the Tyler Durden-esque title character. (Taxi Driver is another, evident from Elliot's voiceover narration and the me-versus-society mentality that leads him into several deranged rants.) But Mr. Robot feels like its own specific cocktail of sci-fi and thriller ingredients, and Esmail isn't afraid to directly reference his inspirations—as when he borrows the Pixies' 'Where is My Mind,' iconically used in Fight Club, near the end of Season 1. It's also not much of a spoiler to acknowledge that Elliot's fracturing identity is a consistent throughline of Mr. Robot. What's going on in Elliot's head is just as important as the latest heist to hurt E-Corp. (In fact, the last couple episodes of the show are basically devoid of hacking.) The sooner you make peace with that focus, the more you'll enjoy the show's many flights of fancy: beginning, perhaps, with the fourth episode, a harrowing and hallucinatory dip into his consciousness as he experiences drug withdrawal. That one feels straight out of David Lynch. Just how weird does the show get? Season 1 of Mr. Robot is the most grounded, and Esmail only directed three of the episodes, though his distinct style—with faces isolated at the bottom edge of the frame as if to emphasize the characters' alienation—was present from the beginning. But he takes over as full-time director from Season 2 onward, dialing up the experimental episodes: a 15-minute '90s sitcom parody; an entire installment presented as a single shot during a riot; a hostage situation with high personal stakes, structured like a five-act play. The show also flirts with science fiction as it goes on, teasing the possibility of time travel and alternate dimensions. That flexibility when it comes to both genre and tone—the show can be funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking, and terrifying—makes it memorable. Does it ever get bad? Most people would agree Mr. Robot is at its worst in Season 2, especially with one key Elliot-centric storyline dragging on much longer than it should. And while the show is filled with interesting supporting characters—from Elliot's morally compromised childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) to the slimy E-Corp brownnoser Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) to a trans cyberterrorist named Whiterose (BD Wong) operating as the Minister of State Security with her birth name—not all of their arcs get the same time to develop and wrap up in satisfying fashion. But the show's occasional lags in pacing are much more bearable on a binge, where you can inhale a whole stretch of slower episodes rather than waiting a week and praying for plot movement each time. Besides, the majority of the dips in quality derive from Esmail prioritizing stylistic playfulness and experimentation over the relatively straightforward, linear storytelling of Season 1. In many ways, Season 2 is easier to admire in retrospect, but it's still a good time if you go in with an open mind. Is the ending satisfying? The show's viewership took a huge hit in Season 2 and never really recovered despite a solid, improved Season 3 and a genuinely rich, fascinating Season 4. In fact, watching back Mr. Robot after knowing where it's all going, the occasional bumps in the road feel beside the point; the show sticks the landing in a way that reframes the entire series in a surprisingly moving way. Credit Esmail, whose projects since include the podcast adaptation Homecoming and apocalyptic-thriller novel adaptation Leave the World Behind, for sticking to his vision for the series—and never straying far from the journey of its unique and oddly relatable protagonist, the heart of the series. Credit should also go to Malek, whose work as Elliot led to starring movie roles like his Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody and his casting as a Bond villain. His stellar vulnerable breakout performance anchors the entire show. It's immediately evident, just from watching the pilot episode, when Elliot Alderson first invites us into his world. Once you're in, you won't want to leave.
