Cara Delevingne Will Join Orlando Bloom in Amazon's Fantasy Series CARNIVAL ROW

Actress Cara Delevingne has recently signed on to star opposite Orlando Bloom in an upcoming Amazon series Carnival Row. This sentence in itself is a less than stellar announcement, so maybe the synopsis that Variety has provided will pump you up a little bit more for the 8 episode season:

Carnival Row is a fantasy-noir set in a neo-Victorian city. Mythical creatures fleeing their war-torn homeland have gathered in the city, and tensions are simmering between citizens and the growing immigrant population. The investigation of a string of unsolved murders begins to eat away at whatever peace still exists.

Delevingne will play Vignette Stonemoss, a faerish refugee who flees homeland to come to the Burgue, where she must contend not only with rampant human prejudice against her kind, but with the secrets that have followed her to this new place

Pumped yet? No? Yeah, I am not sure either. On the plus side, this series is being developed from a feature film script written by Travis Beacham, who is executive producer of the series, under the name of The Killing on Carnival Row. The original script was so good that it made it on the famous Hollywood Blacklist in 2005. The strength of the script and the fact that they got Paul McGuigan to direct the season seems like a good sign. For those of you who are not familiar with McGuigan’s work, he directed some of the best episodes of Sherlock. I am sure he has done other things, but those are the only stats that matter. With all of that going on, you would think that this would be a fairly solid show. 

This is where I have a problem. The casting. Bloom is an okay actor I guess, however, I can never see him as anything else but Legolas. When I see Bloom in anything my first thought is, “Why did Legolas cut his hair?”. Since he is producing this series, dude gets an automatic pass to star in the show. 

Then we come to Delevingne. Did you see Valerian? Whenever I think about it, all I can hear is her yelling "Valerian" over, and over, and over again. Fun fact; that was the first movie that I have ever fallen asleep in. Anyway, no matter how strong the script and the directing are, I don’t think that she has the skills to drive a series. 

What do you think? Does this series have a shot? It will be streaming on Amazon in the fall of 2019.