Octavia Spencer and Jeffrey Wright join Death of a Salesman film
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Chinonye Chukwu, best known for Clemency, will direct a new adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, written by Tony Kushner. Deadline reports that Oscar nominee Jeffrey Wright and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer will star as Willy Loman and his wife Linda Loman in this cinematic version.
The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949, first premiered on Broadway that same February. It tells the story of an aging traveling salesman, Willy Loman, as he struggles to restore his life and family. Over the decades, Death of a Salesman has been adapted many times for film and television. The 1951 movie adaptation, starring Fredric March as Willy, was nominated for five Academy Awards.
Focus Features and Amblin are producing the project. The two companies are also behind this year’s Hamnet, directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Two years ago, Wright was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for American Fiction. His career includes multiple Primetime Emmy nominations, including two for HBO’s The Last of Us (Guest Actor in a Drama) and Marvel/Disney+’s What If…? (Voiceover Performance). He won an Emmy for his performance in HBO’s Angels in America and was recently seen in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and Paramount+’s The Agency.
Spencer won the Academy Award, BAFTA, and SAG Award in 2011 for The Help. Her later roles include Hidden Figures, Ma, The Shack, and The Shape of Water. She has also earned two Emmy nominations, for Lost Women of Highway 20 and the limited series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.
Chukwu won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival for Clemency, which was later nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. Kushner has received multiple Oscar nominations for his screenplays, including Lincoln, Munich, and The Fabelmans.
Next weekend, Focus Features will release Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t; Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale; Anemone starring Daniel Day-Lewis; Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons; and Song Sung Blue, starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson.
