When Netflix landed Black Hole after a competitive bidding war, it wasn’t just another graphic novel adaptation getting dusted off. It was a signal. Charles Burns’ cult-classic body-horror saga, long considered “unfilmable,” is finally being shaped for the screen, this time as a straight-to-series event under filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow).
Set in the seemingly idyllic town of Roosevelt, Black Hole imagines adolescence as a literal contagion. Teenagers who have sex too young contract “the bug,” a grotesque mutation that externalizes fear, shame, and desire. Those infected are cast out, into the woods, into secrecy, into a parallel society where something far more dangerous than the virus itself begins stalking them.
With Schoenbrun writing and directing, and New Regency and Plan B backing the project, the adaptation is clearly aiming for mood over spectacle and psychology over jump scares. Which makes one question inevitable: who should inhabit these characters?
Rather than chasing star power, Black Hole lives or dies by casting that feels unnervingly real. The characters aren’t heroes. They’re awkward, fragile, impulsive, and emotionally exposed. Below is a look at the four core roles and the kind of performers who could bring them to life.
Chris Rhodes
Chris is the emotional anchor of Black Hole. She’s cautious, observant, and quietly skeptical of the myths everyone else half-believes. When she becomes infected, it isn’t framed as punishment. It’s a rupture. Her journey isn’t about survival so much as alienation, watching her body, her friendships, and her future slip into unfamiliar shapes.
Casting Chris requires restraint. The role needs an actor who can carry long silences and register fear and curiosity at the same time. Someone whose presence feels inward, not performative. Schoenbrun’s work suggests a preference for naturalism, faces that feel lived-in rather than polished.
Rob Facincani
Rob is danger disguised as confidence. He’s impulsive, sexually aggressive, and often cruel without realizing it or caring. In Burns’ story, Rob embodies the seductive lie of teenage masculinity, that recklessness equals freedom.
The wrong casting turns Rob into a stock villain. The right casting makes him unsettling because he’s recognizable. He should be magnetic, funny, and deeply broken in ways he refuses to confront. An actor with too much irony deflates the role. An actor with too much sincerity redeems him when he shouldn’t be redeemed.
Keith Pearson
Keith is quieter than Rob, but no less volatile. He’s introspective, guilt-ridden, and prone to self-loathing. Where Rob externalizes his damage, Keith internalizes it until it corrodes him from the inside out.
This is a role built for an actor who can communicate collapse through stillness. Keith doesn’t announce his descent. It sneaks up on him. His arc is one of the most tragic in Black Hole, and it depends on subtle emotional calibration rather than dramatic outbursts.
Eliza (aka “The Lizard Queen”)
Eliza is already halfway to legend when we meet her. Isolated, transformed, and utterly unconcerned with fitting back into normal society, she represents what happens when shame is replaced with acceptance on her own terms.
Physically altered by the bug, Eliza could easily become a spectacle. But the character’s power lies in her autonomy. She’s not pitiable. She’s not trying to be cured. She’s chosen the woods.
Casting Eliza requires fearlessness. The actor has to be comfortable disappearing into the role emotionally and visually without turning Eliza into a symbol instead of a person. Done right, she becomes the most haunting presence in the series.
Why Casting Matters More Than Ever
Black Hole isn’t a nostalgia play. It isn’t chasing comic-book fandom or franchise logic. It’s a coming-of-age horror story filtered through shame, desire, and social exile, exactly the terrain Schoenbrun has explored with uncanny precision in prior work.
That makes casting the series’ most important creative decision. Big names would miss the point. What Black Hole needs are faces we don’t fully trust yet, performers who feel like they could actually vanish into the woods and never quite come back the same.
Netflix has taken a rare risk here, committing to a psychologically abrasive story at a time when safe IP still dominates the landscape. If the casting is as bold as the premise, Black Hole could become one of those adaptations people talk about for years, not because it stayed faithful, but because it understood what made the original so disturbing.
