The Wild Rose actor is set to star in the latest feature film from the director of Annihilation.
According to Deadline, Jessie Buckley is to play the lead role in the project, which follows a young woman on a solo vacation in the English countryside after the death of her ex-husband. In addition to directing, Garland also wrote the script, while Years & Years and No Time To Die actor Rory Kinnear will star alongside Buckley.
The film, titled Men, marks Garland’s first film since 2018’s Annihilation and reunites him with A24, the American production company that launched his directorial career in 2014 with Ex Machina. That film starred Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac, receiving high praise from critics as well as several big award nods – including an Oscar nomination for Garland’s screenplay and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Alicia Vikander.
After a dispute with Paramount that ended up seeing Annihilation on Netflix for the majority of the world rather than in cinemas, Garland took a break from the big screen to make last year’s excellent Devs for FX. The miniseries continued Garland’s run of cerebral science-fiction with its ideas of fate, free will and destiny.
Men, on the other hand, looks at this stage to be a step away from the science-fiction for which he’s known, and will perhaps be more akin to his earlier written works – these include novel The Beach (adapted into film by Danny Boyle), and screenplays for Never Let Me Go (based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name) and 28 Days Later (a zombie horror film which has only become more relevant since its release in 2002).
Buckley, meanwhile, is still riding high from her BAFTA nomination last year for her performance in country & western drama Wild Rose. 2020 also saw the Irish-born actor star in the fourth season of critically acclaimed drama series Fargo, as well as Charlie Kauffman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things for Netflix.
Men is currently in pre-production, and without a release date.
Words by Matt Taylor
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