News about Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time adaptation continues to come in, and continues to be enticing. The latest batch of revelations about the film based on Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult sci-fi fantasy novel comes in the form of more casting announcements (following knowledge that Mindy Kaling, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw have all been cast alongside Storm Reed, who’s playing the film’s protagonist, Meg Murry). This will likely be the last round of casting announcements, as the film went into production in California yesterday.
Entertainment Weekly reports that Zach Galifianakis has been added to the cast as the Happy Medium, the (woman, in the book, and who knows, perhaps here as well) character who reveals to the Murry children — who’ve been taken on an intergalactic journey by a trio of supernatural beings, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which — an essential element of conflict in the novel: the evil force that’s consuming the universe. The Knick and Moonlight’s André Holland (who formerly worked with DuVernay in Selma) will also appear in the film as Principal Jenkins, the stern principal who shows little empathy for the protagonist in her desire to figure out what happened to her missing scientist father. Michael Peña will also be joining the cast as Red, the role based on the book’s character The Man With Red Eyes, the Prime Coordinator of the planet Camazotz.
As the Los Angeles Times points out, Ava DuVernay is, with this film, the first woman of color to direct a live-action film with a budget of more than $100 million, a notion that’ll hopefully be just the beginning of a drastic shift from Hollywood’s discriminatory structures. Yesterday, DuVernay Tweeted:
The film is scheduled to hit theaters in 2018.