Casting News: John Goodman Joins The Beast In Me, Melanie Lynskey's Yellowjackets Follow-Up, And More

"The Beast in Me" has found its newest leading man.

John Goodman ("The Conners") has joined the Netflix thriller's recently announced second season. He'll play Jack, the father of Claire Danes' Aggie, though exact plot details for Season 2 have yet to be revealed.

"The Beast in Me," which starred Matthew Rhys opposite Danes in Season 1, was originally slated to be a limited series at Netflix. But just days after Rhys took home an Emmy for his work in the drama, the streamer renewed it for a second season, with executive producer Howard Gordon saying in a statement, "We always told ourselves we'd only do a second season of 'The Beast in Me' if we found a story that was worthy of the first — and I'm thrilled to say we found it."

In addition to his "Beast in Me" casting, Goodman recently boarded Season 3 of HBO's "The Last of Us" adaptation, playing Joey, one-half of the "Heroes of the Highway" duo.

• Melanie Lynskey, whose four-season run on "Yellowjackets" is about to end, will next star in "Mushroom Murders," a limited series ordered at Paramount+ on Tuesday. The actress will portray real-life convicted murderer Erin Patterson, who served highly toxic death cap mushrooms to her estranged in-laws and their relatives at a 2023 lunch, resulting in three deaths.

• Will Yun Lee ("The Good Doctor"), who was initially cast as a guest star in the pilot of HBO Max's forthcoming family drama "How to Survive Without Me," has been upped to series regular for Season 1, per Deadline. The project follows the De Angelis family in the wake of matriarch Beverly's (Rita Wilson) death; Lee plays oncologist Dr. Marcus Chen, who treated Beverly after her diagnosis.

• Melissa Joan Hart will star in the Lifetime original movie "Black Widow Killer: The Judy Buenoano Story" (working title), premiering Saturday, January 23, 2027 at 8/7c. She'll play real-life serial killer Judy Buenoano, with Chris Bauer ("True Blood") as Detective Chamberlain and Matthew Settle ("Gossip Girl") as Judy's fiancé, John Gentry.

• Apple TV's upcoming "Guilty Creatures" series, starring Julia Garner, has added Brian d'Arcy James ("Smash"), Reed Birney ("House of Cards"), and Gus Birney ("Dickinson") in recurring roles, Variety reports. The show, based on Mikita Brottman's true-crime book, "delves into the psyche of a torrid romance and subsequent act of murder between two young, adulterous but God-fearing lovers, unraveling their complex lives and the emotional toll of living as killers for 18 years," per the official logline.

• Sosie Bacon ("Mare of Easttown") has joined "Game of Thrones" vet Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in MGM+'s "The Black Tapes," based on the horror podcast of the same name. Bacon will play Alex Regan, a brilliant and methodical physicist who "joins the investigation of The Black Tapes as a debunker, but quickly finds her very scientific training means she can't ignore the mounting evidence that these mysteries involve something beyond the natural world," per the official character description.