Alfred Molina turns 73 this weekend, and he is doing it in the middle of one of the busiest stretches of his career. The actor is back in the conversation because Netflix dropped all eight episodes of The Boroughs on May 21, a senior-living thriller that puts him at the center of a mystery built to keep shifting under the audience’s feet.
Molina leads the series as Sam Cooper, a retired engineer who reluctantly moves into a senior living community after losing his wife. The setup turns grim quickly. By the end of the first episode, a monster is eating one of Sam’s neighbor’s faces, and the show keeps pushing from there. For viewers still trying to place Molina outside this role, his name still carries the charge of two Spider-Man films, Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home, where he played Doctor Octopus. But this year has been fuller than that one association. He also starred in the indie dramedy When We Get There and voiced the octopus Marcellus in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures.
The Boroughs was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer, and it uses its eight-episode run to turn a retirement community into something far stranger and darker than it first appears. The cast around Molina includes Geena Davis, Bill Pullman, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Denis O’Hare, giving the series a veteran ensemble that matches its premise. By the finale, the community’s longtime owners are revealed to have been draining the life from elderly patrons to achieve immortality through the energy of Mother, and Sam and his friends break into The Boroughs’ headquarters in a last push against them. For readers tracking the series itself, a separate cast guide has already mapped out the ensemble around Molina in more detail.
Molina said the project hooked him less because of the title or the genre label than because of the shape of the story the creators laid out for him. He said he had never done a TV show that lasted more than one season, and when he was first asked about the possibility, his response was guarded enough to sound almost comic. He also said the showrunners gave him the basic outline of where the story was going and what they wanted in the tone, which mattered because the series asks the audience to trust it even when it is withholding answers. He met Will Matthews in person while doing a play in New York, and Matthews came to see the production with a Netflix executive, a meeting that helped move the project from conversation to reality.
That timing helps explain why The Boroughs fits the moment in Molina’s career. He is not being defined by one franchise part or one medium. He is moving between film, voice work and television, and this year alone the work has landed in all three. The question now is not whether he can carry a series like this. The first season has already done that work. The cleaner answer is that he would return to it. Molina said exactly that, in effect: he would do it again, no doubt.
