'The Body' sets Netflix release date with eerie first look images
Netflix has dropped the first images from 'The Body,' an eight-episode series that places teenage conflict inside a Catholic-school setting. The photos introduce its student ensemble, dance team, and other characters while offering an early look at the story created by 'Under the Bridge' filmmaker Quinn Shephard. All eight episodes of 'The Body' will arrive on Netflix on November 11. The official logline reads, “After a dance-team initiation goes wrong, a group of badly behaved Catholic school girls begin having prophetic visions that set off mass hysteria in their town.”
The first-look photos center on Kristina Bogic as Anya Butler, Sara Boustany as Elise Zakaria, and Geena Meszaros as Lisbeth Anderson. Other images feature Sofia Wylie as Grace Franklin, Gabby Windey as Coach Miller, Nnamdi Asomugha as Father Samuel Franklin, and Louisa Krause as Catherine Anderson. Shirley Chen plays Maddie Delaney, Jackson Kelly appears as Leo Anderson, Marcel Ruiz plays Tyler Santos, and Orlando Norman plays Steven Maxwell.
The recurring cast also includes Kyra Pierce, Phallon Pierce, Ashley Madekwe, Motell Foster, Cale Ambrozic, Anna Tierney, Chloe Longname, Sarah Abbott, Emily Roman, Michela Luci, Bella Neuspiel, Julia Lowe, and Christine Solomon. Netflix’s group image shows several of the Catholic schoolgirls assembled with Windey’s Coach Miller, while other stills pair the teenagers with members of their families and the school community.
Shephard, who serves as showrunner and directs the first episode, described its tone in a statement shared with Netflix’s Tudum. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of girlhood as a religious experience. This story is definitely my way of putting a playful spin on all the nightmares of my own teenage-dom,” she said. “Tonally, I would describe the show as gritty camp. It’s a raunchy teen psychodrama with a dash of Catholic horror.”
The creator also said 'The Body' draws on the movies and subjects that interested her as a teenager. She called the series “a love letter to all the ’90s and Y2K teen movies and erotic thrillers” she watched while growing up, citing 'Carrie,' 'Jennifer’s Body,' 'Heavenly Creatures,' and 'Mean Girls' as inspirations. “I was also a teen with an embarrassingly intense fixation on The Crucible and the Salem witch trials. It’s been very interesting to revisit that with the shading of our current political climate,” she said.
Shephard has described 'The Body' as her “most personal” project. “I joke that this show is so me — it’s really aggressively me,” she told Tudum. “It’s satirizing some of the trauma of growing up queer and repressed and the confusion around that.” Shephard wrote the project as her first television script while she was in her early 20s and returned to it years later.
Peter Chernin, Amy Israel, and Josh Stern serve as executive producers for North Road, and Blair Breard also serves as an executive producer. Riley Keough, Gina Gammell, and Sacha Ben Harroche executive produce for Felix Culpa. The project reunites Shephard and Keough after 'Under the Bridge,' in which Keough starred and served as an executive producer.
