Pennyworth, the TV series about Batman’s butler, has cast its Alfred

The role of Alfred Pennyworth in Epix’s Pennyworth will be played by Jack Bannon (The Imitation Game) and will start filming in Warner Bros.’ Leavesden studios on Oct. 22.

Epix announced that it had given Pennyworth a series order in May 2018, but not much has been heard from the production until now. The show will be set in 1960s England and follow Alfred Pennyworth, a baby-faced former British special forces operative who starts his own security company and winds up working with a young billionaire known as Thomas Wayne.

“Alfred doesn’t know how to reconcile the kind-hearted boy he used to be with the cold, calculated killer he was forced to become,” says a press release from Epix. “He’s a man on the make, who doesn’t know what to make of himself yet.”

Thomas Wayne will be played by Ben Aldridge (Toast, Skinny Dip), who another press release describes as a “confident and extremely disciplined” young aristocrat who “meets an unlikely business partner in Alfred Pennyworth.”

While Alfred was a comic relief character in his earliest DC Comics stories, his concept was later changed to model the dapper and helpful presence of Alan Napier’s Alfred in the 1966 Batman television show, right down to his tiny mustache. Eventually, his backstory was expanded to one worthy of the butler to the World’s Greatest Detective, making Alfred a former Shakespearean actor, army medic and British spy who had passed on his expertise in disguise and throwing voices to a young Bruce Wayne — after inheriting the post of the Wayne family butler after the death of his father.

Epix’s Pennyworth is executive produced by two alums of Fox’s Gotham television series, writer Bruno Heller and director Danny Cannon.