Producer, writer, and director Sam Esmail is most known for his award-winning television thriller Mr. Robot. His next highly anticipated series will be The American Throne.
The new drama series is in the early stages of development. Set in the present day United States, The American Throne explores the alternate-reality politics of an America founded as a monarchy.
Esmail has won awards from the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festivals, the Golden Globe Awards, and the Writers Guild Awards, among others. The first season of Mr. Robot earned him two Emmy nominations.
Sam Esmail wrote the hit series “Mr. Robot”
Esmail made his way into the film industry in editing and post-production. He wrote on the side while dreaming of becoming a filmmaker. Starting in 2008, Esmail gained recognition for his writing. Two of his film scripts earned features on the annual Black List of most-liked screenplays not yet produced. New York-based IFC Films released his debut feature-length film Comet in 2014.
The filmmaker’s hit series Mr. Robot was originally intended to be a feature-length continuation of Comet. The series follows Eliot, a depressed and socially anxious cyber security engineer. Mr. Robot, the leader of an elite hacker group, recruits him to take down the conglomerate E Corp. The USA Network aired the show from 2015 to 2019.
“One of the things that inspired me to write the show was the Arab Spring,” Esmail shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “I went to Egypt right after all that happened and what I thought was so cool is you had these young kids who were angry at what the country was…They leveraged social media and technology, which the older controlling generation didn’t know how to use…and brought about really positive change.”
After Mr. Robot, Esmail directed and produced of the 2018 Amazon Prime Video hit series Homecoming starring Julia Roberts. He also produced the 2020 book adaptation Briarpatch, and his other upcoming shows include Angelyne and the political thriller Gaslit.
Sam Esmail dreamed of making films
Esmail was born in September 1977 in Hoboken, New Jersey to an Egyptian family. He has an older sister and two younger brothers. In fact, his younger brother Samer coordinated post-production for Mr. Robot and Homecoming.
As a kid, Esmail was passionate about film and computers. His parents would drop him off at the movie theater for hours at a time. While at home, he would set up his figurines to make his own movies.
“I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things. Back in my day, those are things that you would get beaten up for,” Esmail recalled.
“It wasn’t until E.T. that I started to think about doing [film] myself…it was the first movie I saw in the theater,” he said in an interview. “I walked out, and I remember thinking, ‘well I can do better than that.’”
In 1998, Esmail graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He earned his bachelor’s in film with a minor in computer science. He started creative writing at Dartmouth University after leaving a dial-up internet startup. In 2004, he earned his Master of Fine Arts in directing from the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles.
In 2017 he married Shameless actress Emmy Rossum. She starred in his debut film Comet and appears in his upcoming project Angelyne. The couple have a daughter, born in May 2021.
Sam Esmail to produce “The American Throne”
“I tend to write about alienated figures who can’t connect with others and who are kind of distant from American culture,” said Esmail. “It’s not something I am consciously doing but it’s something that happens to be infused inside me because of my experience growing up in America.”
The American Throne explores an alternative future where the United States was founded as a monarchy.
“An entirely white royal family is plunged into a scorched earth succession battle when it’s revealed the late king has hidden a mind-blowing secret: A Black son who is the true heir to the throne,” the official synopsis states.
The Mr. Robot creator will be executive producer along with his Esmail Corp. partner Chad Hamilton. Nigerian-American writer and director Julius Onah and filmmaker Peter Glanz will create the script.
Speculation predicts that the new show will premiere in the summer of 2023.
In the meantime, watch Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, or YouTube.
