Jacki Weaver has joined the cast of forthcoming Apple TV+ show ‘Hello Tomorrow!’, Deadline reported. The two-time Oscar nominee will appear alongside Billy Crudup, whose performance was one of the few good positives in season two of The Morning Show. 

Created, written and executive produced by Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, who will serve as showrunners, Hello Tomorrow! is set in a retro-future world. It revolves around a group of traveling salesmen hawking lunar timeshares. Crudup, who also executive produces, stars as Jack, a salesman of great talent and ambition whose unshakable faith in a brighter tomorrow inspires his co-workers and revitalizes his desperate customers but threatens to leave him dangerously lost in the very dream that sustains him.

In a new interview with Gold Derby, Sian Heder discussed how she learned American Sign Language (ASL) and wrote CODA in it. I confess that it didn’t occur to me that such a movie would have to be scripted in this way, although it makes total sense when Ms. Heder explains it. The discussion gives another indication of the pioneering work by both cast and crew to make the film, which is available on Apple TV+.

It’s a “hugely different” process to write in ASL because it “has no written form.” Heder learned ASL in the process of making the film, but at first, “I wrote in English, and I wrote the way that I’ve written every script, where I’m talking out loud to myself and playing every part and really hearing the characters.” Then she and the film’s ASL consultants “went line by line through the script, every piece of dialogue, and we would go back and forth and discuss, and [ASL master Alexandria Wailes] would show me possible sign choices.” That process from the initial English-language script to the finished film was “really amazing,” Heder says. “People talk about that feeling as a writer where you watch your words come to life. And this was the most literal form of that.”