Cast, crew, and characters for Cry Havoc! (Ask Questions Later)

My next big project has been a long-standing dream of mine: a new comedy series about Ancient Rome, and specifically the fall of the Republic. It's my favourite period of history, led by some of the biggest personalities the world has ever known, and I've been dying to get my claws into it. 

Thanks to those fine folks at Rusty Quill, that dream is now coming to a podcast feed near you later this very year! And we've got lots of lovely people involved...

Our historical celebrity line-up includes Lara Sawalha as Queen Cleopatra VII, Kazeem Tosin Amore as Mark Antony, and Harry Roebuck as future emperor Gaius Octavius Caesar. Wooden Overcoats listeners will know that I can't get enough of a good professional rivalry, and I've been itching to put my own spin on these characters for a long time. 

But we're also casting a spotlight on some of the lesser known figures of this period. Sarah Lambie is Caesar's sister Octavia and Ellie Dickens his mother Atia, both of them depicted here in a very different way to HBO's Rome. Then there are those figures who to my knowledge have never been portrayed in mass media before: Aaron-Louis Cadogan plays Mark Antony's son Antyllus, and Beth Eyre his ambitious wife Fulvia, both of them enormous fun to explore for the first time.

Turning to characters hovering on the edges of Shakespeare's plays, Andy Secombe is the muddle-headed politician Lepidus, and Sarah Agha is Cleopatra's servant Charmian, whose need for self-expression fuels a key plotline in the series. Though fully fictional, director Quintus as played by Benjamin Garrison represents a wildly vivid Roman theatre scene that remains mostly unknown to a wider audience. Finally Ryan Hopevere-Anderson is Sextus Pompey, the Roman who ran away and became a pirate!

They'll be performing scripts written by me and our incredible team of Octavia Bray, Tom Crowley, Maud Dromgoole, Grace Knight, Rafaella Marcus, Sarah Shachat, Rhys Tirado, and Robert Valentine. And we all serve at the whim of series director Amani Zardoe, whose tireless work and insightful story notes have already been invaluable to the development of the scripts. 

This is a real labour of love and I'm very excited to see where this goes when we begin recording in July! There are many more people whose splendid contributions are yet to be announced, and some extra surprises up our sleeves, so do keep an eye on Rusty Quill's socials for the latest updates...