Bard to get a Game of Thrones makeover
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET, the dashing young actor who has become the award season’s heart throb, is in talks about playing Prince Hal in a film based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V.
Chalamet is likely to work with the Australian actor and film-maker Joel Edgerton, who has adapted the two plays. He has been working on the scripts for several years.
He once told the film site Indie Wire that he’d written the Henry plays ‘as a period film, but with our own (modern) dialogue.
‘For lack of a better explanation, it’s Game Of Thrones meets Shakespeare only in that you can watch Game Of Thrones and understand what’s going on,’ he said. The Bard ‘does the kind of roundabout version of telling you simple things.
‘So we just wanted to let the audience understand exactly what’s going on, and not just some people but everybody.’
The film will shoot on locations in the UK and Hungary, starting in late May or early June.
Chalamet made his name in Homeland, playing the son of the VicePresident. He went on to appear in several films, including favourites of mine, Lady Bird and Hostiles, but he broke through playing a youth who has a summer of love with a slightly older man (Armie Hammer) in Call Me By Your Name.
The movie garnered four Oscar nominations including a Best Actor citation for Chalamet, who finds himself in contention with Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Kaluuya, Gary Oldman (the favourite) and Denzel Washington for the Oscar crown.
Chalamet has met with director David Michod, who will direct the S Shakespeare film, called King.
The movie’s being backed by Netflix and will have a theatrical run first and then go onto the streaming service.
It’s being produced by Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, who run Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. They were also closely involved with Oscar-winning Best Films 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight.
Edgerton starred in last year’s i inter-racial romance film Loving, also starring Ruth Negga, and will soon be seen in the spy thriller Red S Sparrow with Jennifer Lawrence.