It’s been 25 years since a young Matthew McConaughey starred across from Samuel L. Jackson and Sandra Bullock in Joel Schumacher’s courtroom drama A Time to Kill, based on the 1989 John Grisham novel of the same name. According to Variety, the True Detective actor is attached to star in HBO’s potential adaptation of the novel’s second sequel, currently in development at the network. The book, A Time for Mercy, was published this past October.
The original novel followed McConaughey’s Missouri lawyer Jake Brigance as he defends a Black father who has killed two white men who brutally raped his daughter, taking on both an all-white jury and the Ku Klux Klan in the meantime. Now, Brigance must defend a teenage boy who has shot his mother’s abusive boyfriend, the town’s deputy sheriff. The character also appeared in Grisham’s Sycamore Row, published in 2013.