With credits on Severance and Andor, Willimon is one of the highest paid writers in TV. Now he’s tackling artificial intelligence in a new play in London
It’s been more than a decade since Beau Willimon wrote a new play, but nobody could call him idle. In that time he created House of Cards, the Washington DC political thriller series that gave Kevin Spacey his most captivatingly sinister lead role. The show he left it to create — the Sean Penn sci-fi series The First — lasted only one season. Yet he went on to write the film Mary Queen of Scots, is co-writing the forthcoming Star Wars film Dawn of the Jedi and has written several episodes of the much-lauded Star Wars TV series Andor. What’s more, he’s a writer on the second series of Severance, the Apple TV+ hit.
Anyway, he says more than once as we sit facing each other in low-slung leather sofas in the offices of the Hampstead Theatre, what he wants to talk about is his new play. East Is South is about artificial intelligence; a trendy topic, he knows. But even though he started the play in 2023 when the Writers Guild of America strike forced him to down tools on his TV work, he had been circling the subject for years…..