Various sites, including Variety, reported this week that Mexican actor Diego Boneta has been cast as one of the main male characters in The Dovekeepers, an upcoming miniseries about four Jewish women who live in the fortress of Masada when it is besieged by the Romans following the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Boneta joins the Chilean-born Cote De Pablo, who was cast as one of the four Jewish women last month.
The Dovekeepers is being produced for CBS by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, who had a huge success last year with The Bible and again this year with its big-screen spin-off, Son of God. All this casting news for The Dovekeepers gets me wondering… when will we hear any casting news for A.D., the follow-up to The Bible that Burnett and Downey are producing for NBC?
The question is all the more pertinent — urgent, even — because The Dovekeepers does not yet have a broadcast date, to my knowledge, whereas A.D. has already been set to premiere on April 5, which is less than eight months from now.
Incidentally, Deadline reported last month that the producers were originally thinking of shooting The Dovekepeers in Israel, but eventually decided to shoot it in Malta, because of all the violence in the Middle East. ’Twould be a shame if they didn’t shoot any scenes at the actual Masada. (The 1981 miniseries was filmed there.)
Also, while The Dovekeepers isn’t technically a Bible movie — it’s set a few years too late for that, and as far as I know it features no biblical characters — this isn’t Boneta’s first brush with the genre, broadly defined. Three years ago he was cast as Adam in Alex Proyas’s adaptation of Paradise Lost, which was ultimately never filmed.
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