Stephen Colbert is adding steadily to his growing list of Hollywood credits.
The late-night host, fresh off the announcement that he will pen a Lord of the Rings spinoff film, will also add The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff, The Testaments, to his list of upcoming projects. Colbert will voice the opposition’s radio announcer, “Radio Free America,” according to TV Insider. Oprah Winfrey previously voiced the role in The Handmaid’s Tale’s second season.
The new series will premiere on Hulu on Wednesday. It stars One Battle After Another’s Chase Inifiniti. Ann Dowd, who won an Emmy for her role as Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid’s Tale, reprises her role in the spinoff, which takes place four years after the events of the Elizabeth Moss-led dystopian series.
Testaments showrunner and executive producer, Bruce Miller, told TV Insider that Colbert was cast in the role because he’s “a good person to be the voice of free speech in America.”
Colbert’s Late Show will end next month, after a tense back-and-forth with the Trump administration that has made the host a martyr in the age of Trump’s crackdowns on his critics in the media.
The showrunner said the host—whose popularity among poll participants was rivaled only by the Catholic pope last month—is the ideal voice for the story’s opposition movement.
“He’s Stephen Colbert. If I was building ‘Radio Free Boston,’ he would certainly be one of the people on the list to be the DJ,” Miller said, “just like Oprah was.”
He added, “He certainly would be on that list regardless of whether he had a talk show or not,” but admitted he liked that synergetic time between the cancellation of Late Show and Colbert’s voice appearance in the series: “I like it when that happens,” he said.
Colbert revealed in a podcast appearance on Monday that in crafting his next moves after hosting The Late Show for the last 11 years, he was inspired by Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader’s pivot to full-time South Park writer after leaving that show.
“I said, ‘Man, that’s the perfect thing to do,’” Colbert recalled thinking. “Just go serve something that you love already… Don’t even worry about the status of your previous gig. Just go do something you love.”
