Metro Weekly

WATCH: Trailer released for ‘Hollywood,’ Ryan Murphy’s LGBTQ-themed spin on cinema’s Golden Age

Limited series blends real-life and fictional characters to explore race, gender, and sexuality in Hollywood

hollywood, ryan murphy, trailer, netflix, gay
Archie (Jeremy Pope) and Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) — Photo: Netflix

The official trailer for Hollywood is here, and it’s jam-packed with Golden Age drama, glamor, and sex appeal.

The limited series, which starts streaming on Netflix on May 1, “follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost.”

Each character in the series — the latest effort from Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Feud, Glee) and Ian Brennan (Glee, The Politician) — helps spotlight the “unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day,” according to Netflix.

A number of famous faces are present in its large ensemble cast, including Queen Latifah, Patti LuPone, Holland Taylor, Daren Criss, Dylan McDermott, and Jim Parsons.

Hollywood features both fictional and real-life characters, including Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel (Latifah), closeted movie star Rock Hudson (Jake Picking), and gay talent agent Henry Willson (Parsons).

Writer, producer, director, and trans activist Janet Mock, an executive producer on the series, said that Hollywood aims to “spin an aspirational tale of what ifs.”

“What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story?” Mock told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay? And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”

She said the series was intended to be a “love letter to our little industry town where dreamers dwell, stars are born and magic transcends reality.”

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