Earlier today, Entertainment Weekly shared a round official images of characters from Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, giving us glimpses at the trio of Mrs. (Which — Oprah Winfrey, Whatsit — Reese Witherspoon, and Who — Mindy Kaling), and a smattering of other key characters in the adaptation of the beloved Madeleine L’Engle book. Since their release, they’ve been rapidly circulating across social media:
Up there, you’ll have also caught Chris Pine as Mr. Murry, the scientist dad of the film’s young protagonist, Meg. (His disappearance prompts the action of the film.) On EW, you’ll also find images of Storm Reid as Meg, and Levi Miller as Calvin, Meg’s schoolmate who ends up quickly getting involved in the search.
DuVernay told Entertainment Weekly about what drew her to the project and to L’Engle’s young adult’s sci-fi novel (adapted by Frozen writer Jennifer Lee) — a perhaps unexpected turn given DuVernay’s historically oriented work with Selma and her documentary on mass incarceration and the hideous history that predates it in 13th, or her character driven drama series Queen Sugar. She says:
I saw so much beauty in it, but also so much meaning. She’s a very radical thinker and she embedded her sense of what society should and could be in this piece, and a lot of it I agree with. And through that, the story of this girl saving the world and being out there in the universe slaying the darkness, it also says a lot about slaying our own dragons.
As many have noted, this marks the first film with a budget of over $100 to be directed by a woman of color — both a milestone and a sobering fact when considered against Hollywood’s historic bloat of huge-budget films. DuVernay told EW, “There aren’t any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with.”
In the piece, she also speaks to her casting choices for other actors, emphasizing that Storm Reid’s name is fitting as she’s “a force,” that Chris Pine is the “first full-on heart-throb type of actor that” she’s worked with, but that she “just saw a damn good actor,” and that for the Mrs., she wanted to “bring in culture, bring in history in their costumes,” and “reflect a fuller breadth of femininity.”
She also Tweeted something that’s very much of interest: the first trailer will arrive this Saturday.
The film itself is out March 9, 2018.