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[This story contains spoilers up to episode four of The Shards.]
Igby Rigney was a big Ryan Murphy fan when the audition came to him for the lead role in The Shards. The process took a couple of months and, after landing the pivotal part, he dove head first into the book by Bret Easton Ellis on which the FX adaptation is based.
Rigney still hasn’t met Ellis, who co-wrote the first two episodes with Murphy and then took a step back in what has been described as a “godfather-y approach” with the nine-episode adaptation that Murphy and Ellis plan to turn into a multi-year series. But Rigney has heard that Ellis is enjoying his take on Bret, the 17-year-old protagonist and narrator who is a fictionalized version of Ellis in his autofiction classic.
“Obviously, the book has a very specific ending, but we’re deviating from the source material a little bit in bringing it to the screen, so I’m not sure how any of that is going to play out,” Rigney tells The Hollywood Reporter of Murphy adding in new storylines and characters to extend the show into three or four seasons. But by the end of season one, “people are going to be very split between the characters of Bret and Robert,” Rigney says. “We do get to a point of picking sides.”
