Tom Holland’s upcoming show, The Crowded Room, gives the Spider-Man star a 1970s look, but what is it about? The Apple TV+ anthology series is based partly on the true story of Billy Milligan, a.k.a. “The Campus Rapist.” The show only recently started filming, so it likely won’t be out until 2023, at the earliest. As such, details about the true-crime show are currently scarce, but there is some basic information about its subject and premise out there that can be gathered now.
In the late 1970s, Billy Milligan was put on trial for multiple counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape, but he avoided prison by way of pleading insanity. Various psychiatric hospitals examined Milligan and concluded that he had more than 20 different personalities, with several of them taking the blame for the crimes. Milligan was the first person to be acquitted of a major crime thanks to dissociative identity disorder. His story is the subject of Daniel Keyes’s award-winning nonfiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan and, more recently, the Netflix documentary series Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan.
Billy Milligan’s story is set to be adapted again in The Crowded Room, with Tom Holland cast in the lead role and also serving as an executive producer. The story takes place in the 1970s, so it makes sense for the actor to have a look that would be commonplace in that decade. This part of Milligan’s life also happened between his early twenties and early thirties, so Holland, who is 25 at the time of writing, should be in the correct age range. Uncharted star Holland will be joined in the series by The Dropout‘s Amanda Seyfried, plus Emmy Rossum, Sasha Lane, Christopher Abbott, and Emma Laird.
The Crowded Room won’t offer a straightforward adaptation of Milligan’s story. According to various reports, season 1 of the series will only be taking inspiration from Milligan’s story, specifically via Keyes’s The Minds of Billy Milligan. And among other changes, it will also be partly based on the life of Hollywood screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who is the creator of the show. He is best known for scripting both Batman Forever and Batman & Robin and then winning an Oscar for his screenplay for the biopic A Beautiful Mind. This is likely why Holland’s character in the show is named Danny Sullivan and not Billy Milligan.
Information about The Crowded Room is still scarce, so it’s unknown what sort of changes the Star Trek: Picard executive producer will make to Milligan’s story, especially with his own life being incorporated into the show. Goldsman’s parents were both clinical child psychologists who worked with emotionally disturbed children, so whatever he experienced growing up around that may factor into the show, somehow. Also, A Beautiful Mind deals with mental disorders, specifically schizophrenia, so Goldsman already has experience working with the subject matter.
Production on The Crowded Room only recently began, so more details about what the anthology true-crime series will be like and the kind of character Tom Holland will be playing will be made more apparent in the months to come.
