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Q: What ever happened to Clive Owen? He used to be everywhere, but I haven't seen him in a while. 

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

Big-screen leading man Clive Owen ("Children of Men," 2006) has actually been doing pretty steady work lately. If you haven't seen it, it's either because you were looking in the wrong place or because it was a flop that nobody saw.  

His most successful role lately has been on the small screen instead of the big one — he did a stint as President Clinton on the third season of "American Crime Story" in 2021. 

But he's mostly stuck to his normal milieu of feature films, even though he hasn't had much luck. He's had a run of pretty notable flops, such as the crime drama "The Informer" (2019), the sci-fi film "Anon" (2018), and, the biggest flop of them all, the 2017 space opera "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets." This high-profile, long-developing project based on a popular French comic barely earned its enormous, $177-million budget back.  

All this seems to have convinced Owen to commit to TV. And that decision is paying off already, in the form of a lead role in a high-profile series coming soon to AMC.

It's high-profile specifically because of his character: he'll be playing Sam Spade, the beloved literary sleuth created by crime writer Dashiell Hammett, made famous in the 1941 cinematic classic "The Maltese Falcon." 

"Monsieur Spade" is about an older version of the character, retired from big-city detective work and living out his golden years in small-town France in the early 1960s. 

The series has reportedly wrapped filming already, but there's no word yet on a release date. 

 

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