Mitch Hurwitz Talked Alternate Casting and ‘Arrested Development’ Plans

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz was the keynote speaker at the New York Television Festival last night, and as he tends to do, he dropped some tantalizing hints and secrets about the past and future of the show. As he’s mentioned before, the tentative plan is to next make an Arrested Development movie with the entire cast together, probably for Netflix, and then move on to making the show’s fifth season.

“I love the idea of doing let’s-call-it-a-movie on Netflix that leads into another season on Netflix,” Hurwitz told The Wrap after the panel. “I would love the creative challenge of it and I love that it could be a good strategy of keeping the Bluth family alive while we’re trying to put together another season.”

Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from last night (via The Wrap and The Week):

  • Jeremy Piven was Hurwitz’s first choice for Michael Bluth, but Jason Bateman impressed him in the audition.
  • He originally considered casting How I Met Your Mother’s Josh Radnor as Michael and The Sopranos’ Aida Turturro as Lindsay.
  • Hurwitz actually knew someone who lost their medical license under “similar circumstances” to Tobias Fünke, who famously had his license revoked after performing CPR on a sleeping man.
  • When he wasn’t sure Michael Cera would be available for the new season, Hurwitz thought about recasting Jonah Hill as George Michael and having Michael be the only one who noticed in a reference to the 2008 Angelina Jolie movie The Changeling.
  • Hurwitz says he has no interest in working in broadcast television again.
  • He wanted to ask Robert De Niro to play George Sr., when it was supposed to be just a one-time character in the pilot. Hurwitz recalls, “I was going to go to Ron Howard and say, ‘What really, really high-level guy can we get? Do you know Robert De Niro from Backdraft? Will he give us a day?’ And then eventually it felt dumb to do that. It just felt weird.”
  • Mitch Hurwitz Talked Alternate Casting and ‘Arrested […]