Maniac Teaser Trailer: Jonah Hill, Emma Stone Stare Each Other Down
Just like the unnamed woman Michael Sembello sang about was a maniac on the floor, Jonah Hill and Emma Stone are maybe-maniacs in a shockingly white room.
Netflix dropped the first teaser trailer for Maniac, the upcoming limited series from Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director and executive producer of the first season of True Detective.
The footage raises just as much intrigue as it does tease the story, opening on Hill's Owen Milgrim and Stone's Annie Landsberg sitting at opposite ends of a table while Justin Theroux's Dr. James K. Mantleray delivers in voiceover what sounds like the beginning of a manifesto: "Once you begin to appreciate the structure of the mind, there's no reason to believe anything about us can't be changed. The mind can be solved."
Wearing the same light gray jumpsuits, their hands folded on the tabletop, Owen and Annie stare into each other's eyes as the room flashes blue, green, and red light. Annie gives Owen a feeble smile before the series' title card swipes across the screen.
With your interest now sufficiently piqued, you probably have a ton of questions about Maniac, its story, who Owen and Annie are, how they found one another, and what treatment Dr. Mantleray is providing them. The teaser trailer doesn't do a lot to answer those inquiries, but we've got the information you're after, courtesy of Deadline.
Hill's Owen is the son of well-off New York industrialists who has spent most of his life battling schizophrenia — the diagnosis of which has long been up for debate. (Does he really have schizophrenia, or is something else at play in that noggin of his?) As for Stone's Annie, she is hyper-focused on the fractured relationships she has with her sister and her mother; this fixation has left her purposeless and malcontent, potentially even prone to dissociation.
Theroux's Dr. Mantleray brings the pair together, as he oversees ten other patients in addition to Annie and Owen at the facilities of Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech. There, the 12 strangers undergo a three-day drug trial meant to repair their minds for good — with no complications, no returning mental illnesses, and no side-effects whatsoever. Unfortunately, life isn't that easy and things don't go as Dr. Mantleray or his dozen human guinea pigs expected.
Maniac is based on the Norwegian television series of the same name, created by Espen Lervaag and Hakon Bast Mossige. That series kept comedy at the forefront, flipping between showing Lervaag's character — a mental asylum patient also named Espen — inside the institution and exploring his wildest fantasies. Fukunaga's Maniac appears to be darker than the series from which it draws inspiration, but considering it's billed as a black comedy, there should be loads of humorous moments sprinkled throughout.
And how couldn't there be with Hill and Stone leading the cast? Both actors have plenty of experience top-lining comedies and even starred together in the 2007 coming-of-age teen flick Superbad. Maniac will mark their second — and decidedly more mature — collaboration.
Catch Maniac, which is giving us series Legion-meets-A Cure for Wellness vibes, on Netflix on September 21.