First ever American pontiff: Jude Law plays young Pope in new series

Jude Law is a chainsmoking young pontiff in Paolo Sorrentino’s new show, The Young Pope. Will he prove a miracle, or the ultimate broken male antihero?

How excited should we be about The Young Pope? Very, probably. Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, creator of The Great Beauty and Youth, all signs point to the series being a strikingly auteured vision that could have only been created at this specific moment in time.

Then again, The Young Pope is also a programme in which Jude Law plays an ambitious, American, cigarette-smoking Pope. That’s all we have to go on. The finished result could be a rehash of every male antihero trope that’s come to represent the golden age of TV. Fortunately, a trailer has just emerged. Let’s take a look, reports the Guardian.

The trailer opens with a shot of Lenny Belardo – aka Pius XIII, the first American Pope in history – opening his eyes in closeup, just like the shot of Jack Shepherd that opened Lost. From this we can learn that Lenny is ambitious but flawed, that he’s propelled by a dark secret that’s given him a misplaced hero complex, and that he might be an antihero of some description.