Laverne Cox is going from Litchfield to the police force. The Emmy-nominated “Orange Is the New Black” actress has been added to the cast of ABC’s hour-long pilot “The Trustee,” Deadline reports. She and Meaghan Rath (“New Girl,” “Being Human”) topline the buddy cop comedy that hails from Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman’s Brownstone Productions and Warner Bros. TV.
Rath will play Eliza Radley, “a driven but stubborn detective who finds unlikely help from her precinct’s trustee, Amanda Jones (Cox), a larger-than-life ex-con finishing out her prison sentence doing menial tasks for the police department,” Deadline summarizes. “Though these two have completely opposing views on crime and punishment, a highly entertaining and successful partnership is born.”
While the potential series is female-led, it’s penned by “Smurfs” writers Jay Scherick and David Ronn.
Cox’s most recent project, CBS’ Katherine Heigl legal drama “Doubt,” was recently pulled from the network after just two episodes aired. Cox’s role in the show put her in the history books as the first transgender actress cast as a regular on a broadcast series.
“I’m an avid TV watcher, and there are people in my community who watch a lot of TV. Growing up, I did not see people like me on television,” Cox has said. In 2014, she became the first transgender person to make the cover of Time. “I realize this is way bigger than me and about a tipping point in our nation’s history, where it is no [longer] acceptable for trans lives to be stigmatized, ridiculed, criminalized, and disregarded,” Cox said of the cover.
Whether or not “The Trustee” gets picked up, we’re betting that we’ll be seeing the rising star on a broadcast series in the near future.
