James Cromwell Joins Cast of AMC's HALT AND CATCH FIRE

According to Deadline, Emmy winner James Cromwell has joined the cast of AMC's drama HALT AND CATCH FIRE.

Cromwell will play "Jacob Wheeler on the Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers created AMC series. A self made Texas millionaire and energy company CEO, Cromwell's Wheeler is looking to expand his corporate reach. That expansion brings him both close alliance and in conflict with the ever ambitious Joe MacMillan, played by Lee Pace."

James Oliver Cromwell is well known to Australian audiences after playing Farmer Hoggett in Babe, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. During his career Cromwell has been nominated for an Oscar, four Emmy Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards during his career. He won the 2013 Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor for his role in Still Mine and the 2013 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his role in American Horror Story: Asylum.

From AMC Studios, "Halt and Catch Fire" captures the rise of the PC era in the early 1980s, during which a renegade trio - a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy - risk it all to realize their vision of building a computer that could change the future. The series charts the changing culture of Texas' Silicon Prairie while tensions build within the group as they attempt to truly innovate. They navigate the thin line between genius and delusion, as their drive to do something that might truly matter runs up against innumerable obstacles. The 10-episode series is created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers and executive produced by showrunner Jonathan Lisco ("Southland"), Gran Via Productions' Mark Johnson ("Breaking Bad," "Rectify," Diner, Rain Man) and Melissa Bernstein ("Breaking Bad," "Rectify").

"Halt and Catch Fire" is set roughly one year after IBM all but corners the market with the release of its first major product - the IBM PC. It is also the same year people realize that the IBM PC has a fatal flaw, which quickly makes personal computing anyone's game. In this fictional drama, a former IBM executive, Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), plans to reverse-engineer the flagship product of his former employer, and he forces his current company, Cardiff Electric, into the personal computer race. MacMillan enlists the help of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a once-great engineer who dreams of creating a revolutionary product while trying to manage his initially-unsupportive wife, Donna (Kerry Bishé), and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), a volatile prodigy who puts her future in jeopardy to join MacMillan¹s Rogue PC project.

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