Ray Romano cast in HBO Max’s tragicomedy Made for Love

Get Shorty star Ray Romano has been cast in HBO Max’s upcoming drama Made for Love.

Ray Romano, best known for the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond but most recently starring in Get Shorty for Epix, has been cast in HBO Max’s upcoming adaptation of Alissa Nutting’s tragicomic novel Made for Love. The series is said to be a darkly humorous and absurd tale of divorce and revenge as Hazel Green (Cristin Milioti) fleas her suffocating husband of 10 years and finds herself stalked and betrayed.

She discovers that her husband, a sociopathic tech billionaire, has implanted a monitoring device in her brain which allows him not only to know her whereabouts but also to know her thoughts and feelings. In an attempt to escape him, she turns to her estranged father.

Romano will play Herbert Green, the estranged father to Milioti’s Hazel. He is a widowed ex-con who avoids emotional attatchment and lives with his synthetic partner Diane, a high-end sex robot. When Hazel turns up on his doorstep desperate for help, he is forced to face his responsibilities and the mistakes of his past in order to save her.

I have no idea what the tone of the original novel is like, but I can totally see Romano’s lax, distressed face and a dry, helpless quip in a half-hearted attempt to get out of doing something he already knows is unavoidable. If you want someone to react absurdly in the face of extreme situations, Romano’s understated non-reactions would certainly be bizarre and incongruous during high tension moments.

Made for Love comes from novelist and television writer Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers, Maniac) who definitely has both high tension drama and surreal comedy under his belt. If you saw The Leftovers, he left you wrecked as a human being by the end of pretty much every episode. I think we’re in for something pretty special.

Source: Deadline