Olli Haaskivi has been officially announced as the latest name to join the cast of The Big Cigar on Apple TV+
Olli Haaskivi, who starred in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, has been added to the cast of Apple TV+’s The Big Cigar. Alongside André Holland and Alessandro Nivola, Apple TV+’s next limited comedy-drama series will also star Haaskivi. Apple TV’s April reveal of The Big Cigar was inspired by a similar item published in 2012 in Playboy by Joshua Bearman. Bearman recounts the “almost too wonderful to be true” account of how Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther political movement, reached out to his buddy Bert Schneider, the Hollywood producer behind The Monkees and Easy Rider, for help in escape to Cuba in the 1970s.
Newton (Holland) and Schneider (Nivola) are being aggressively pursued by the FBI, and the Apple TV+ series will chronicle their harrowing attempt to flee the country. Arthur “Artie” A. Ross, the real-life Hollywood screenwriter behind classics like “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “The Great Race” (1976), will be portrayed by Olli Haaskivi in The Big Cigar (1965). Although his role in Newton and Schneider’s escape plan and The Big Cigar Apple TV+ is unknown, Deadline claims that Ross was banned from Hollywood at the beginning of the Red Scare in the 1950s and 1960s.
Olli Haaskivi is well-known for his involvement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he has also appeared in shows including Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017), and HBO’s Queer as Folk (2022), NBC’s Manifest (2018), and CBS’s Elementary (2018). (2012). In addition to his film performances, Haaskivi has acted off-Broadway in An American Tall Tale and The Rafa Play.
Both Jim Hecht (Ice Age: The Meltdown) and Joshua Bearman (who wrote the original Playboy piece) contributed to The Big Cigar. Showrunner and NAACP Image Award winner Janine Sherman Barrois (Criminal Minds) and director Don Cheadle (House of Lies) have signed an overall contract with Warner Bros. Television to create a new drama series. Universal plans to release The Big Cigar, starring Olli Haaskivi, in July 2023.