Paul Wesley Joins Netflix's Icebreaker as Coach Neil Faulkner
Paul Wesley has joined the cast of Netflix's Icebreaker, where he will play Coach Neil Faulkner, according to Deadline.
The show is adapted from the novel by Hannah Grace. Deadline reports that the book has spent 70 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, meaning it stayed on the chart's weekly ranking of top-selling titles for more than a year and a third. The same report says the novel has sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide.
Wesley joins a cast that was already taking shape. Daisy Jelley plays Anastasia Allen and Connor Simos plays Nate Hawkins. Gabriel Tierney, Auli'i Cravalho, Peter Berry, Chaneil Kular, Devin Craig and Aidan Shaw were also announced earlier.
Production is under way in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. "Production" is the industry word for filming, so cameras are rolling on the series now rather than the project still being planned. Vancouver has long been a base for North American television shoots, with crews, studios and locations close at hand.
Jade Halley Bartlett created the series. Amanda Lasher is its showrunner and writer, the person who runs the writers' room and the day-to-day making of the show. Executive producers Lasher, Bartlett, Hannah Grace, Alex Cooper, Matt Kaplan and Mina Lefevre are credited for Unwell Productions. An executive producer is a senior figure who oversees a project from the top, often with a major say over money and creative choices.
For viewers, the immediate change is simple. The show has moved past the stage of script and casting and into filming, and the next step for a Netflix series is the work of shooting, editing and finishing episodes. Deadline's report did not, in the text available here, tie that process to a release date, so there is no date to pass on yet.
For the crew, the news means a long stretch of work. Shows like this one employ large teams of actors, camera operators, set builders, costume and makeup artists, and drivers, and most of them will be on set in Vancouver for the months of filming ahead.
