Here’s Fire Island, the star-studded, gay adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Janeites rejoice: Vanity Fair has released snapshots from Searchlight Pictures’s Fire Island, the new, queer adaptation of Pride and Prejudice written by comedian Joel Kim Booster. Booster stars as Noah, a modern spin on Elizabeth Bennet; Margaret Cho and Bowen Yang co-star.
It’s a bold idea to set an Austen adaptation on Fire Island, but it makes perfect sense: Booster is a lifelong Austen fan, and Fire Island is a locale that fosters the same elaborate social relationships, rife for satire, as Austen’s settings. “Jane Austen’s observations about the way people are awful to each other without being awful to each other—I was like, Oh, my God. This is shade,” Booster told Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy. “This is what gay men do all the time.”
“A Jane Austen narrative meeting an Asian American narrative meeting a queer narrative: Those three helices come together in a way that’s greater than the sum of their parts,” Yang told Vanity Fair. “And to say that something is greater than a Jane Austen narrative is insane—unhinged of me—to do. But I said it.”
Fire Island will be released on Hulu on June 3; in the meantime, read the full Vanity Fair piece here, and check out the pictures below.
