Two-time Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help) appears in talks to headline the period drama Woman Walks Ahead. The film, which will be directed by Susanna White (Generation Kill) from a script by Oscar nominee Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), centers around Caroline Weldon, a 19th century Brooklynite who became a Native American activist.
The story has been circling Hollywood for about a decade now but may come to fruition with Chastain at its center. Based on a true story, Weldon was a Brooklyn artist and activist who journeyed to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory and became a confidante to Sioux chief Sitting Bull. She became a full-fledged activist in aiding the Sioux tribe to keep their land. The press of the day even, viciously, referred to her as “Sitting Bull’s white squaw.” Ed Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz, Rick Solomon and Erika Olde have come aboard to produce the film and hope to lure buyers at the Berlin Film Festival.
Chastain, recently seen in the Oscar nominated science fiction film The Martian the ornate period fantasy Crimson Peak, will next been seen on screen in The Huntsman Winter’s War and The Zookeeper’s Wife. She has the gun-rights drama Miss Sloane and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan both upcoming. White most recently helmed Our Kind of Traitor starring Damien Lewis (Romeo & Juliet) and Ewan McGregor (Jane Got a Gun) while Knight previously wrote and directed by the Tom Hardy vehicle Locke and will pen the screenplay for Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming World War II thriller starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard.
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