The hardest thing a comedy star can do is disappear into someone else. Eric McCormack won a Lead Actor Emmy for Will Truman and has spent the years since arguing, role by role, that the man behind network television’s most quotable sitcom lead keeps darker registers in reserve — the fractured neuroscientist of Perception, the haunted team leader of Travelers. Signing on to Nimisha Mukerji’s You’re Safe Now, a small character study shooting in Toronto, is the most disciplined version of that argument he has made yet: not a louder role, but a quieter and more punishing one.

As Deadline first reported, McCormack headlines a film its makers describe as an aching portrait of loneliness, mortality and the monstrous forms love can take. Written by Jess Mastro, it is a chamber-scale psychological thriller rather than the procedural machinery of McCormack’s recent television — a register that asks an actor to hold silence and dread rather than deliver punchlines.

The choice of director sharpens the bet. Mukerji came up in documentary, where her feature 65_RedRoses, a portrait of a young woman with cystic fibrosis, was championed by Oprah Winfrey; she then moved into prestige drama, directing the most harrowing hour of Hulu‘s Emmy-nominated Under the Bridge and steering episodes of Tracker, Big Sky and 9-1-1. A filmmaker who learned to frame real grief without flinching is a pointed match for a story about how tenderness turns predatory.

Around McCormack the ensemble skews younger and genre-fluent: Anja Savcic (Loudermilk), Jesse Rath (Supergirl) and Bo Martynowska (Nancy Drew), performers at ease with the tonal knife-edge a psychological thriller demands. It is exactly the kind of mid-budget, adult-facing drama that studios have largely stopped bankrolling, which makes its independent financing as much a part of the story as its marquee name.

You’re Safe Now is being produced and financed by The Launch Company, with Chris K. Daniels producing alongside Mastro and Craig Fleming. The production is under way in Toronto.

For a performer still introduced, decades on, by a character he stopped playing, a hushed Canadian thriller about the wreckage people make of one another is the least commercial move available — and precisely for that reason, the most revealing.

Tags: casting, production-start, Eric McCormack, Nimisha Mukerji, You're Safe Now