After an extremely busy couple of years that saw Jessica Chastain star in eleven films, she's taken it easy a little bit in 2013. Her year began with the horror sleeper Mama, while two-parter The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby hit festivals but won't arrive in theaters until next year. That's when we'll see Chastain in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and likely in Liv Ullman's Miss Julie. Now she's taking on yet another project, one that will see her reunited with screen legend and Coriolanus co-star, Vanessa Redgrave.
According to producer Neal Pearson, Chastain and Redgrave will lead an adaptation of Sebastian Barry's award-winning novel, The Secret Scripture. Written by Johnny Ferguson, the complicated story centers on the mysterious past of a 100-year-old mental patient in Ireland. Chastain and Redgrave will play the young and old versions of the lead character, Roseanne McNulty, whose troubling memories are often at odds with one another.
No word on a director just yet but filming is expected to begin next June. Read the book's synopsis below.
The latest from Barry (whose A Long Way was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker) pits two contradictory narratives against each other in an attempt to solve the mystery of a 100-year-old mental patient. That patient, Roseanne McNulty, decides to undertake an autobiography and writes of an ill-fated childhood spent with her father, Joe Clear. A cemetery superintendent, Joe is drawn into Ireland's 1922 civil war when a group of irregulars brings a slain comrade to the cemetery and are discovered by a division of Free-Staters. Meanwhile, Roseanne's psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, investigating Roseanne's original commitment in preparation for her transfer to a new hospital, discovers through the papers of the local parish priest, Fr. Gaunt, that Roseanne's father was actually a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. The mysteries multiply when Roseanne reveals that Fr. Gaunt annulled her marriage after glimpsing her in the company of another man; Gaunt's official charge was nymphomania, and the cumulative fallout led to a string of tragedies.
