A new law drama on ABC features Andy Garcia playing a big-time attorney.
Oscar-nominated actor stars in Rebel, a series inspired by Erin Brockovich‘s story, the legal clerk that was the subject of the 2000 film Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts. That role won Roberts an Academy Award. However, the TV series is “inspired by the life of Erin Brockovich today,” according to a network press release. Back in the early 1990s, Brockovich helped win a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in 1993 against Pacific Gas & Electric Company of California—that despite the fact she didn’t have any legal education. The consumer advocate and environmental activist is now a media personality who has a consulting firm and has even hosted television shows.
Rebel centers on Annie “Rebel” Bello, played by Katey Sagal (Married With Children), a blue-collar legal advocate without a law degree. She’s described as a “funny, messy, brilliant and fearless woman who cares desperately about the causes she fights for and the people she loves,” hence the series’s title. “When Rebel applies herself to a fight she believes in, she will win at almost any cost,” reads a press statement.
Garcia plays Julian Cruz, a powerful but down-to-earth attorney for whom Rebel consults. Recently widowed, Cruz is still recovering from the loss. He is often pressed by Rebel to take on activist cases and represent the oppressed.
Rebel marks Garcia’s return to a television series after having appeared in Quibi’s Flipped and Amazon’s Modern Love and being the voice of King Fialkov in the Netflix animated sci-fi 3Below: Tales of Arcadia. He is set to direct and star in the biographical drama Hemingway & Fuentes about the acclaimed novelist Ernest Hemingway and Gregorio Fuentes, the Spanish man who reportedly inspired the American writer to pen the famous short novel The Old Man and the Sea.
The Cuban-American leading man rose to prominence in Brian De Palma‘s 1987 The Untouchables, a mafia film that received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. Garcia went on to star in other features like the education drama Stand and Deliver and the crime thriller Internal Affairs. In 1990, he was featured in Ford Coppola‘s crime movie The Godfather Part III, opposite Al Pacino and Diane Keaton. That performance won Garcia an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Other feature films the Rebel actor has starred in are When a Man Loves a Woman, opposite Meg Ryan, and Desperate Measures, opposite Michael Keaton.
Garcia is also featured in the film trilogy Ocean’s—Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen—and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
Joining Garcia on the Rebel cast are John Corbett (Sex in the City), James Lesure (Las Vegas), Lex Scott Davis (Toni Braxton), Tamala Jones (Castle), Ariela Barer (Runaways), Kevin Zegers (Fear the Walking Dead), Sam Palladio (Nashville) and Karina Noelle Castillo (Superstore).
Krista Vernoff (Grey’s Anatomy, Station 19) is the creator and showrunner of Rebel. The series is executive produced by Vernoff and Alexandre Schmitt of Trip the Light, John Davis and John Fox of Davis Entertainment, Andrew Stearn, Marc Webb and Adam Arkin. Brockovich herself is also a producer.
The series is produced by ABC Signature in association with Sony Pictures Television.
Rebel is part of the ABC’s Thursday lineup starting April 8.