Amanda Plummer, T'Nia Miller Join Cuarón's Cult Series in Secret Roles

Christopher Chung also joins Caitríona Balfe and Bill Nighy in the Apple TV horror series inspired by Adam Nevill's novel 'Last Days.'

Amanda Plummer, Christopher Chung and T'Nia Miller just joined Alfonso Cuarón's Apple TV cult series "Ascension," playing characters nobody will name yet. Variety reported Wednesday that all three were cast as series regulars and that details of their roles are being kept under wraps. Deadline also reported the casting the same day.

Plummer ("Butterfly Kiss"), Chung ("Slow Horses") and Miller ("The Haunting of Bly Manor") join Caitríona Balfe, who leads the show and executive produces it, and Bill Nighy, whose casting was announced earlier. That's five actors.

Balfe plays Rose. She's a documentary filmmaker and a mother just out of a divorce, good at prying the truth out of other people and stuck on her own. In Apple's Aug. 10 announcement, she starts a film about a 20th-century cult called the Church of Ascension and finds comfort in its teachings, until she finds something much worse underneath them.

The show is inspired by Adam Nevill's 2012 novel "Last Days," and it's already rearranged the book. Nevill's filmmaker is a man, Kyle Freeman, and his cult is called the Temple of the Last Days, according to the book's synopsis. In Bloody Disgusting's 2013 review, Kyle is offered £100,000 for the job. The night his cult destroyed itself is called the Night of Ascent.

The novel also has a big part waiting for somebody: Sister Katherine, the cult's manipulative leader, under whom the group slid from wife-swapping to murder, Bloody Disgusting's review says. Its reviewer wrote that the scariest stretches feel like Nevill "is giving your heart a bare-handed squeeze." Apple's description of the show doesn't name a leader for the Church of Ascension at all.

Variety also named who's running the show. Natalie Erika James and Christian White, the pair behind "Relic" and "Apartment 7A," are co-showrunners, and James is the lead director. Cuarón is writing it with them and his brother Carlos, and he's executive producing through Esperanto Filmoj, his company, which has an overall TV deal with Apple. Apple called it Cuarón's next project with the streamer after the limited series "Disclaimer."

For a Cuarón show, he's been fairly hands-off behind the camera so far. The Playlist pointed out in August that he hadn't yet been named one of the show's directors, and that no production start or premiere date had been set.

It's also a show that's waited a long time for a cast. The Playlist reported that the project goes back to 2017, when Casey Affleck was attached to star, and that version never came together. Nearly nine years later, the lead is a woman with a camera, and three of her co-stars are playing people nobody's describing yet.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 29, 2026. Other sources: Variety, Apple, Wikipedia, bloody-disgusting.com, theplaylist.net.