As A&E’s Bates Motel rounds its shower-stabby conclusion, star Freddie Highmore books new pilot Baby Face with the network.
After spending five seasons playing the iconic, personality-split Hitchcock film killer Norman Bates in A&E’s acclaimed Psycho prequel series Bates Motel, Freddie Highmore has made an arrangement to stick with the network, albeit in a much different way. The 24-year-old English actor joined forces with one of Bates’s creative forces to sell a new show to A&E.
Variety reports that Bates Motel executive producer Kerry Ehrin and its star Freddie Highmore have successfully pitched a dramatic television pilot called Baby Face to A&E, centering on one of the United States’ most notorious figures during the 1930’s Prohibition Era. Highmore will trade his role of the tortured, awkward, Oedipal Norman Bates to play a young outlaw who brandished a lot of swagger in bank robber George Nelson (real name Lester Joseph Gillis), whose youthful countenance earned him the nickname “Baby Face.” Both Ehrin and Highmore will serve as executive producers on the prospective series.
The original idea for Baby Face reportedly came from Highmore, who, as of late, has been embracing his creative side. He’s been spending time in the Bates Motel writer’s room, absorbing the process, which yielded the opportunity to nab his first writing credit for last May’s Episode 8 of Season 4, “Unfaithful.” Of course, Baby Face will also represent an intriguing expansion of Highmore’s acting chops, playing the criminal wunderkind Nelson, who had been associated with the penal system since age seven. Baby Face’s exploits as a bootlegger, robber of cash and jewels and murderer throughout the 1930’s escalated to a point when he was declared Public Enemy Number One by the FBI. However, the show will go the anti-hero route, showcasing “a story of young love,” presumably with Nelson and wife Helen Wawrzyniak, “rallying against the establishment.”
For now, fans of former child star and burgeoning creative maestro Freddie Highmore’s work still have Bates Motel‘s fifth and final season on the docket, which will play out the classic story of 1960’s Psycho with pop star Rihanna playing one of film’s most famous murder victims Marion Crane. That will happen sometime in May 2017.