Outside of her recent pivotal role in the final season of You, plus an upcoming appearance in Scream 7, Anna Camp is taking her onscreen career into her own hands.
Following the premiere of her dystopian short Neo-Dome at SXSW 2024, the actress told Deadline that the team is “looking for a home” for a series adaptation of the proof-of-concept, for which they’re planning to complete the first season themselves.
“We’re actually now deciding to go the independent route and just make eight episodes ourselves, which is really exciting,” she said at Friday’s OUT100 celebration. “And we have a whole story and the whole bible all drawn out, and it just got so much buzz because I think the short itself is just so good. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but we’re going to try to make it available for people to see it now online, so hopefully more people will get a chance to see it.”
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Camp added, “You have to create your own work, especially in this climate. It’s very difficult. There’s less jobs and there’s more actors fighting for those jobs, so it’s hard and it’s scary. But if you don’t do it, sometimes it’s not going to get done. So, that’s what we’re doing right now. We’re doing it ourselves.”
Written by Matt Pfeffer and directed by Bonnie Discepolo, Neo-Dome is set in the near future, 20 years after the collapse of the American economy and events that spiraled the world into disarray. The short centers on an ensemble of characters venturing towards a distant utopian dome in quest of a new beginning. But as they soon realize, the journey to a better life is never quite as easy as it appears.
“We were friends with Anna and she said she wanted to get more into producing,” Pfeffer told Deadline following its SXSW debut. “She loved the script and wanted to play the lead in it, Monica, but also said that we should build this out into something bigger, as a series, so it shifted gears towards more of an episodic piece and we created the pilot.”
Matt and editor brother Mark Pfeffer were previously seeking a studio deal for the pilot, expressing doubt that the season could be completed independently.
Many filmmakers and showrunners are taking the indie route with their TV projects, with Heebuck creator Michael Polish telling Deadline the new model is “the wave of the future.”