The Riverdale universe is expanding with a new leading lady! The CW hit’s upcoming spinoff, Katy Keene, will star Pretty Little Liars alum Lucy Hale.
The Truth or Dare actress, 29, shared the exciting news with fans on Twitter on Monday, March 11. “Well I’m slightly freaking out!” she wrote. “Thank you @archiecomics / @writerras / @thecw / @warnerbrostv / @thatthingofwhen for trusting me to be your KATY KEENE. my heart is bursting.”
The former Privileged star will play Keene, an up-and-coming fashion star living in New York City alongside Archie Comics character Josie McCoy, who will crossover from Riverdale and be played by Ashleigh Murray.
Hale is best known for her role as Aria Montgomery from PLL, which ran from 2010 to 2017. She was cast in the lead role of Stella Abbott in CW’s Life Sentence, but the show was canceled after just one season in May.
Camille Hyde, Lucien Laviscount, Jonny Beauchamp and Julia Chan have also signed on to star in the series, which has been billed as a “musical dramedy” by Entertainment Weekly, though their roles have yet to be announced.
Coming on the heels of Riverdale’s other spinoff, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which premiered on October 26, there’s also room for new characters from the Netflix hit to make their debuts in Katy Keene.
Riverdale writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and television producer Michael Grassi (Degrassi: The Next Generation) have been tapped to script the project — and they may not stop there.
As Aguirre-Sacasa, 44, told the Hollywood Reporter in January 2017, “One of the nice things about me being a part of Archie Comics is having access to a library of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Josie and the Pussycats … those are characters who can very easily support their own show. But we [also] have superheroes. So in success, yes, the goal is to expand that way.”
Katy Keene is set to premiere on the CW later in 2019.
