Mark Ruffalo Joins Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein Pic Poor Things

May 21, 2021

According to Collider, Marvel Cinematic Universe star Mark Ruffalo has signed on to star opposite Oscar winner Emma Stone in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a reimagination of the Frankenstein story. It also previously revealed that Oscar-nominee Willem Dafoe and Golden Globe winner Ramy Youssef were in talks to join the project. It’s unclear if Dafoe and Youssef are still attached to appear or not.

Ruffalo’s casting comes after he has won his first Golden Globe award in February for his acclaimed leading performance in HBO’s limited series, I Know This Much Is True. He is currently in production for Marvel Studios’ upcoming MCU series She-Hulk, where he will reprise his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk.

First published in 1992, Poor Things is a Victorian-set novel that will feature Emma Stone as Bella Baxter – a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. It was also inspired by Mary Shelly’s classic gothic novel Frankenstein.

The upcoming adaptation is being described as a Victorian love story about discovery and scientific daring. This project will also reunite Stone, Lanthimos, and writer Tony McNamara, who all previously worked together on the 2018 acclaimed period dramedy The Favourite.

Pick up a copy of the novel here!

The film’s synopsis reads:

Ostensibly the memoirs of late-19th-century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless, the narrative follows the bizarre life of oversexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman, and a female Frankenstein. Bella is not her real name; as Victorian Blessington, she drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, but a surgeon removed the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placed it in her skull, resuscitating her. The revived Bella has the mental age of a child. Engaged to marry McCandless, she chloroforms him and runs off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure, hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. As her brain matures, Bella develops a social conscience, but her rescheduled nuptials to Archie are cut short when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington.

Poor Things will be directed by Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay he co-adapted with Tony McNamara, who co-written the director’s last movie that had earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Production is scheduled to begin this year in the fall.