Just a day after she nabbed the lead role in Spike Jonze’s next film, the actress who is currently shooting Steven Sodebergh‘s Bitter Pill has been attached to another drama. Coming off her Oscar nomination for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney Mara is looking to star in Brooklyn, adapted from Colm Toibin‘s novel by Nick Hornby (About a Boy). [THR]
The film will be produced by those behind An Education, including screenwriter Hornby and his wife Amanda Posey, who runs the outfit Wildgaze with Finola Dwyer. The coming-of-age film will see Mara play a young Irish woman who heads to the New York City borough for a new life.
After her dark role in David Fincher‘s film, it’ll be nice to see Mara handle something a bit more standard. While I wasn’t bowled over by Lone Scherfig‘s Carey Mulligan drama, it was the lead performance that got me, something Mara is certainly capable of pulling off. But personally, my most-anticipated Mara role will be that in Terrence Malick‘s upcoming film.
Check out a synopsis of the novel below via Amazon.
From the award-winning author of The Master, a hauntingly compelling novel—by far TÓibÍn’s most accessible book—set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s about a young woman torn between her family in Ireland and the american who wins her heart.
Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, Eilis cannot find a proper job in the miserable Irish economy.
When an Irish priest from Brooklyn visits the household and offers to sponsor Eilis in America—to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood “just like Ireland”—she realizes she must go, leaving her fragile mother and sister behind.
Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and studies accounting at Brooklyn College, and, when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian, slowly wins her over with persistent charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. Eilis is in love. But just as she begins to consider what this means, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.
With the emotional resonance of Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes, Brooklyn is by far TÓibÍn’s most inviting, engaging novel.
The $25 million production is set to shoot next spring.