Andy Serkis is bringing this 1996 Elizabeth McCracken novel to the big screen.
The maestro of the motion capture suit Andy Serkis (aka Gollum aka King Kong aka Caesar the aggrieved chimp aka Supreme Leader Snoke aka Baloo the singing bear) is having quite the year. After directing the superhero flick Venom: Let There Be Carnage (which grossed a cool $500 million) and playing a (relatively) youthful Alfred Pennyworth opposite Robert Pattinson’s emo Bruce Wayne in 2022’s first mega-hit The Batman, Serkis, it was revealed last week, will helm an upcoming animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
This morning brings even more Serkis news, with the announcement that the 58-year-old “King of Post-Human Acting” will direct a movie adaptation of Elizabeth McCracken’s acclaimed literary romance, The Giant’s House.
A 1950s-set love story about “a little librarian on Cape Cod and the tallest boy in the world,” McCracken’s debut novel was a National Book Award finalist back in 1996 and received rave reviews in The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and elsewhere.
Adding to the star-wattage of this project, Oscar-nominated novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, Wild, Brooklyn) will pen the script.
It’s always (or almost always) welcome news for a writer when Hollywood comes knocking, but there must be an extra frisson of surprise and delight when the approach concerns a work you’ve been done with for over 25 years.
Here’s hoping that Serkis and Hornby’s adaptation makes it over the line, and that the film prompts a whole new generation of readers to pick up McCracken’s marvelous first novel.
[via Deadline]
