Meryl Streep will join Jeff Bridges’ film adaptation of the Lois Lowry novel The Giver.
Streep will play a chief elder, who is charged with keeping everyone in line in the seemingly utopian society.
In October 2012, Lowry expressed doubt that her novel would ever get a film adaptation. She said the rights have been out there for 15 years, and that a big studio will come along and it will look like the film is closer to getting made. But every attempt so far has fallen apart.
“So it’s out there, and I should be feeling excited, as if now is the time it’s actually going to be made,” she said. “But this has happened so often before that I’ve become kind of sanguine about it.”
But Jeff Bridges had always been interested in bringing the beloved novel to the big screen. He bought the rights over a decade ago and envisioned his father, Lloyd Bridges, as the titular character. His father died in 1998, and in 2012, Bridges decided he wanted to play The Giver, who holds the memories of his community. Lowry approved of Bridges in the role, despite her skepticism.
“When I think about a potential movie, he’s the one I see in it because he’s the one who legally has the right to play that role now,” she said. “There are other actors that I could see there, but I purposefully put them out of my mind because that overcomplicates it.”
In December, Lowry confirmed that the film had been given the green light.
Home And Away actor Brenton Thwaites has been cast as Jonas , who is selected to become the next “Receiver of Memory.” The character has been aged up from the novel; Thwaites is 24, and Jonas was 12.
In the meantime, Meryl Streep will be reuniting with Robert De Niro in The Good House , based on the novel by Ann Leary. The two have worked together in three other movies.
Are you excited to see Meryl Streep in The Giver?
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