Riz Ahmed goes to be Hamlet. The “Nightcrawler” star will painting the prince of Denmark in a forthcoming adaption of “Hamlet” that will even star Morfydd Clark as Ophelia and “Conversations With Mates” star (and Taylor Swift’s beau) Joe Alwyn as Laertes, Ophelia’s brother.
A launch date has not been set but, however Aneil Karia has been confirmed because the director, and the script shall be written by Michael Lesslie, who additionally wrote 2015’s “Macbeth” and met Ahmed in college. Lesslie and Ahmed have been conceptualizing the venture for not less than 10 years, Ahmed informed Deadline. It’s going to comply with the identical plot as Shakespeare’s traditional tragedy, with Ahmed’s Hamlet haunted by the ghost of his lifeless father, solely will probably be based mostly in present-day London.
“It is a movie about most of the urgent problems with our time,” Ahmed mentioned to Deadline. “It offers with race, greed, capitalism, corruption and privilege, and but it additionally boils all the way down to being a fantastic thriller. It has components of psychological horror and motion. The script is fast-paced and kinetic, leaping from one visually wealthy setting to a different.”
The movie will take audiences from “the various totally different sides to London from the elite night time life and tremendous automobiles to ornate Hindu temples and battered down funeral properties, from council estates to plush excessive rises. London is a metropolis of juxtapositions and haves and have-nots,” Ahmed added, noting that the movie will place Hamlet as a member of a rich British Indian household.
It’s going to additionally give attention to psychological well being, a subject Karia addressed in his Sundance 2020 debut, “Surge.” “What we turned enthusiastic about was a really singular, first individual, visceral movie about human fragility and sanity,” he informed Deadline. “This shall be a pared again model of the verse. We need to be true to the verse however to create a world, a tone and supply that enables folks to step into it. We need to break down partitions for generations which have felt any barrier to entry relating to Shakespeare.”
