Meryl Streep In Talks to Join ‘The Giver’

Meryl Streep isn’t letter age slow her down one bit. When many of her, ahem, august station might be thinking about retirement, Streep is lining up the projects. In addition to her newly announced role in The Good House, Streep has starring role in August: Osage County (out in December), has just finished up work on Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman, and is getting ready to start on the fairy tale film Into the Woods. Now she’s in negotiations for a role alongside fellow sexagenarian Jeff Bridges and relative newcomer Brenton Thwaites in the film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

Playing antagonists seems to be in for Streep as well. Into the Woods positions her as the witch opposing the likes of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of beanstalk fame), Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and while her role as a society elder in The Giver might not be quite so overtly malignant, she’ll nonetheless embody much of the society which Thwaites’s protagonist Jonas struggles against. For those unfamiliar, The Giver, first published in 1993, takes place in a society that has abandoned the trauma of memories for the comfort of conformity. Jonas, upon turning twelve, is selected as the new Receiver – the society’s sole repository of memories.

The film is being produced by The Weinstein Company and Walden Media. The adapted script was penned by Vadim Perelman, the writer and director behind House of Sand and Fog, which differs greatly in subject matter but shares some subtle, but important, parallels in both theme and tone. The Giver will be directed by Phillip Noyce (Salt, Rabbit Proof Fence), and production is being planned in South Africa, likely sometime next year.