Rising actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle) appears set to re-team with her Beyond the Lights director Gina Prince-Blythewood in a new drama entitled An Untamed State, currently in development at Fox Searchlight. The film is an adaptation of Roxane Gay’s debut novel. Prince-Blythewood and Gay will co-write the screenplay. Michael De Luca will produce the film.
The drama relates the harrowing tale of a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom in the presence of her husband and young child. Gay’s novel focused on what made this woman such a target to begin with as well the strength she must summon in order to survive such an ordeal.
Filmmaker Prince-Blythewood has helmed previous acclaimed titles including Love & Basketball (2000), The Secret Life of Bees (2008) and Beyond the Lights (2014), which featured Mbatha-Raw as a Rihana-like superstar. Rising British talent Mbatha-Raw broke through in that film and showed off her range in the period film Belle, released the same year. Since, she has co-starred in Jupiter Ascending and Concussion. She will next appear in Free State of Jones opposite Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey, The Whole Truth alongside Keanu Reeves (John Wick) and Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary) and has both the gun-control drama Miss Sloane (starring Jessica Chastian) and Disney’s live-action reboot of Beauty and the Beast scheduled for next year.
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