If interesting stories and unexplored topics is something you consider as entertainment, Florence Pugh’s upcoming film will make it to your watchlist super soon. The actress will be teaming up with Netflix in a new period drama The Wonder, based on the novel of the same name by Emma Donoghue. Sebastian Lelio has directed the film and Alice Birch is the screenwriter.
The film will take you back to 1990s and will explore a mind-boggling phenomenon that was the talk of the town.
Here is everything we know so far about The Wonder.
When is The Wonder releasing?
As of now, there is no official release date announced but the film is all set to release sometime in 2022 itself.
The Wonder CastThe Wonder will see Florence Pugh as the lead. She will play Lib Wright who is an English nurse who tries to solve the mystery of the “fasting girls”. You will also see Niamh Algar, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Burke, Toby Jones, David Wilmot, Elaine Cassidy, Brían F. O’Byrne Dermot Crowley, Josie Walker as Sister Michael, Caolan Byrne as Malachy O’Donnell, Mary Murray, John Burke, Abigail Coburn as Ryan Girl Kíla Lord Cassidy as Anna O’Donnell, Niamh Finlay as Young Woman, Stephen Ball as Gentleman, Emer Casey as Woman ’50s, and Ava-May Taylor as Village Girl, according to IMDb.
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What is the plot of The Wonder?
Netflix’s The Wonder will adapt Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel of the same name. The film is set in Ireland circa 1862 and follows the harrowing tale of the “fasting girls,” who mysteriously stopped eating but never starved. In the film, Florence Pugh portrays Lib Wright, a nurse who attempts to unravel the mystery of the “fasting girls” as a sensationalist frenzy begins to overtake the girls’ small Irish town. The film is under production currently and we might get latest updates about the film in the coming months.
The synopsis as per IMDb says, “A tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.”
Donoghue took to her website and explained how she came up with the idea of The Wonder. “I came across the Fasting Girl phenomenon back in the mid-1990s. I was instantly intrigued by these cases, which seemed to echo medieval saints starving as an act of penance, and also modern anorexics, but weren’t exactly the same as either. It seemed to say a lot about what it’s meant to be a girl – in many Western countries, from the sixteenth century right through to the twentieth – that these girls became celebrities by not eating. But I never found one real case that rang that little bell in me, telling me this was the story I had to tell in a novel. Some were too tragic, even for a writer with my dark tastes, some were low comedy,” she wrote.
She further added, “Finally it occurred to me that if I was still so fascinated by the Fasting Girls, two decades on, I should drop my usual method of writing a historical novel based on a real case, and let myself invent a story. I’d set it in Ireland, of course – not just because that’s my homeland, but because ever since the Great Famine of the 1840s, we’ve defined ourselves as a people intimate with hunger.”