EXCLUSIVE: John Wick: Chapter 4 star Shamier Anderson has landed the role of controversial Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson in Hate the Player: The Ben Johnson Story, which has secured a greenlight with Paramount+ Canada and GameTV.
Airing early next year, Anderson will play the runner who was the world’s fastest man at the 1988 Olympics but was stripped of his medals for doping. The self-described “definitely-not-biased account” of the controversy will take a satirical look at events surrounding the legendary race and scandal behind the scandal. Paramount+ has been developing the New Metric Media and Bay Mills Studios-produced series for the past couple of years in Canada.
Anderson played Mr Nobody / The Tracker in John Wick: Chapter 4, as well as appearing in Simon Kinberg’s Invasion on Apple TV+, which will launch its third season later this year. He also starred opposite Paul Walter Hauser in IFC Films’ The Luckiest Man in America, which premiered at TIFF 2024.
Hate the Player comes from Anthony Q. Farrell, the BAFTA-winning and Emmy-nominated writer whose credits include The Office and Run the Burbs. Anthem Sports & Entertainment’s linear network GameTV has commissioned the six-episode series and will be its exclusive cable home in Canada, while Paramount+ in Canada, which developed the series with New Metric, will be its exclusive streaming platform in the country. New Metric is selling internationally.
“Everyone thinks they know the story of Ben Johnson and the scandal that has followed him since the 1988 Olympics, but they won’t know what hit them with Hate the Player,” said Anderson. “For me, this hits differently. I grew up in Scarborough, where Ben trained, where his name still echoes. He was a hometown legend. Yes complicated, but also someone people rooted for. Getting to do this alongside New Metric Media, who’ve been killing it in comedy, is a real honour, not just as an actor, but as an executive producer with my company, Bay Mills Studios.”
New Metric boss Mark Montefiore added: “From the outset, we knew two things to be true. One, people knew what Ben Johnson did to the world, but not what the world did to Ben Johnson. And two, if we were lucky enough to tell this story, that Shamier Anderson had to play Ben. Full stop.”
The show is being produced with participation from Johnson and is inspired by extensive research conducted by Canadian author and journalist, Mary Ormsby. Principal photography begins in two days at Dark Slope Studios in Toronto.
