Northern Lights ahoy for McAvoy
JAMES McAVOy will play ruthless adventurer Lord Asriel in the BBC television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s best- selling His Dark Materials trilogy.
Signing 39-year-old Scot McAvoy is a real coup for the Beeb. The actor is immensely popular because of his big screen work — he was in the X-Men film series and the recent Split (in which he played multiple personalities), and will be in the next It movie (It: Chapter Two) based on Stephen King’s clown chiller.
Asriel, a powerful nobleman, is one of the main pillars of Pullman’s trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1995, followed by The Subtle Knife in 1997 and ending with The Amber Spyglass in 2000.
The stories travel across parallel universes and play tricks with time and language. At the heart of the tale is plucky schoolgirl Lyra Belacqua who, when we first meet her, lives among academics under the guardianship of the Master of fictitious Jordan College, Oxford, and is accompanied by her shapeshifting daemon Pan (short for Pantalaimon).
Over the course of the novels, Lyra criss- crosses the known worlds to find a lost friend. As the story progresses, Pullman reveals the bonds that link Lyra (to be played by Dafne Keen, Wolverine’s daughter in the film Logan) and Asriel.
The drama’s producers at TV company Bad Wolf have signed veteran star Clarke Peters (so good as a top cop in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) to play the Master who helps raise Lyra. (By the by, I plan to rewatch the seminal American HBO drama The Wire, in which Peters played pivotal character Lester Freamon.)
I reported back in March that Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda had been picked to play balloonist Lee Scoresby, another key figure in His Dark Materials.
Mammoth sets are being constructed at Bad Wolf’s studio in Cardiff, where much of the production will be filmed.
Scenes will also be shot on location in Oxford. Oscar-winning film-maker Tom Hooper — who made The King’s Speech and Les Miserables — will direct the first episode later this month. Jack Thorne, who is in the running for a Tony award on Sunday for the Harry Potter play The Cursed Child, has written the eight-part series.
Pullman returned to his heroine Lyra in La Belle Sauvage — The Book Of Dust, the first volume of his next trilogy.
That book has been nominated for a literature prize in the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, which are announced on July 1.