Comin-Con @ Home is giving fans the first inside look at Leonardo DiCaprio’s television adaption of “The Right Stuff”.
The upcoming drama series is based on Tom Wolfe’s iconic nonfiction book of the same title, about the early days of the U.S. Space Program and the unbelievable story of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts.
During a panel on Saturday, the cast, including Patrick J. Adams, Jake McDorman, James Lafferty, and the crew talked about the new Disney+ series which is the service’s first scripted show from National Geographic. The Conversation was moderated by Mae Jamison, the first Black female astronaut to go to space. The panellists reflected on how the show came to be and the amount of research involved in bringing the real-life characters to life.
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“The Right Stuff” focuses on young, determined astronauts who rose to fame by risking their lives to be one of the first to leave the planet.
Adams is at the centre of the series, playing Major John Glenn. He spoke about shifting over from “Suits” to “The Right Stuff,” confessing that he “got extremely nervous and freaked out” about portraying his character.
“I thought, ‘There’s no way I could do this. What have I gotten myself into?’ And then I decided to get to work and took advantage of the enormous amount of information there is about John Glenn,” Adams said. “I never had the opportunity to play someone where there’s so much written and there’s so much at your disposal. I started rereading [The Right Stuff] and going over the book he wrote [John Glenn: A Memoir] and a couple of books that he had written about him.”
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“But then I found out about the Ohio State [University] archives that had been maintained and that he played a big role in over the years,” Adams added, “and I managed to spend 12 hours in there going through boxes of his stuff.”
Within those 12 hours, Adams found a pot of gold, unpacking a ridiculous amount of boxes filled with letters that Glenn wrote to his wife, Annie, who is played by Nora Zehetner in the series. “It wasn’t just the information that was contained in the letters, it was the tone of voice, it was the way they spoke to each other, it was the way they referred to each other, it was the things he was thinking about,” Adams explained. “So it was little things like that that I kept putting into the bank.”
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“There was one thing in particular that I found — it was a large black-and-white print of John Glenn and Scott Carpenter embracing each other with Glenn’s head tucked tight. And it said it was the moment Scott Carpenter had gotten back from space,” Adams revealed. “When I saw that photo, it spoke specifically to a larger sense of what these guys were doing, being the first people in the United States to have this insane experience.”
There is no word on when the series will premiere, however, during the panel, McDorman shared an exclusive clip from “The Right Stuff.” Take a look:
