Celebrating her 49th birthday today, Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz (The Constant Garderner) has been tapped to star in BBC Films’ drama film adaptation of author Max Porter’s newest novel titled Lanny, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed. Weisz will also serve as the film’s producer along with The Bureau.
Lanny will follow the story of a boy, who has recently moved into an English town village with his family. The novel is described as chimerical, audacious, strange and wonderful. It will be tackle subjects about difference, imagination, friendship, youth, and love. It was published today, March 7 by Faber & Faber.
“With such a peerless combination of talent involved this was an easy decision to make,” Agent Lesley Thorne at Aitken Alexander Associates said. “We can’t wait to see how they realize Max’s unique storytelling onscreen.”
The film’s producer Tristan Goligher of The Bureau added. “We all fell in love with this wonderful novel and can’t wait to find the right writer and director to bring this distinctive, wise and moving story to the screen.”
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The book’s official blurb reads: “There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.
Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.”
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Weisz gained recognition through her role as Evelyn Carnahan in the blockbuster action horror films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns starring alongside Brendan Fraser, John Hannah, Kevin J. O’Conner and Arnold Vosloo. Her other notable film credits include: Envy, Constantine, The Lovely Bones, The Bourne Legacy, The Lobster and Disobedience.
She is also known for her critically-acclaimed performances in Terence Davies’ drama film The Deep Blue Sea and in the drama thriller The Constant Gardner which had earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She recently starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy drama The Favourite opposite Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Emma Stone.
(Photo Credits: Getty Images)
