Oscar winner Tim Robbins has closed a deal to play the male lead opposite Holly Hunter in Six Feet Under and True Blood creator Alan Ball’s new drama series for HBO.

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Written by Ball, the yet-untitled 10-episode series focuses on a contemporary multi-racial family: philosophy professor Greg Bishop (Robbins), his lawyer wife Audrey (Hunter), their three adopted children from Somalia (Jerrika Hinton), Vietnam (Raymond Lee) and Colombia (Daniel Zovatto), and their sole biological child (Sosie Bacon). This seemingly perfect, progressive family is in actuality harboring deep rifts. Then, one of the children begins to see things others cannot. Is it mental illness? Or something else? The series is a tragicomic meditation on the complicated forces at work on us all in America today. Robbins’ Greg questions his life, his purpose, and the world in which he lives – a world in which it seems the bad guys have won – and his strained relationship with his wife Audrey adds to his overall anxiety.

Ball executive produces through his Your Face Goes Here, along with Peter Macdissi.

This marks Robbins’s return to HBO where he starred in, directed and produced political satire The Brink, which ran for one season. Robbins, who won a supporting actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his role in Mystic River, will next be seen in Marjorie Prime opposite Jon Hamm, Geena Davis and Lois Smith, a film he also co-produced.

For the past 35 years Robbins has served as Artistic Director for the Actors’ Gang, a theater company, which has provided arts education to thousands of students in underserved communities in the L.A. area, and provided theatrical workshops to incarcerated men and women in the California prison system. Robbins is repped by ICM Partners.