‘Mudbound’ Director Dee Rees Teams With Anne Hathaway For ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’
While all of the attention has gone to socially conscious Oscar front-runners likeThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, MissouriandGet Out,Anne HathawayandDee Reesboth quietly delivered two of the most powerful movies of 2017. Hathaway starred in the cleverColossal, whose themes of domestic violence elevated its quirky sci-fi underpinnings, while Rees directed the racially-charged period dramaMudbound. Now, the two of them will be teaming up for their next project.
Hathaway will be starring inThe Last Thing He Wanted, an adaptation of aJoan Didionpolitical thriller directed by Rees.
Hathaway is in negotiations to play the lead role of a “hardscrabble journalist Elena McMahon,” who becomes entangled in the arms race around the Iran-Contra Affair, according toVariety.
It’s probably not a role that Hathaway is unfamiliar with, having played an admittedly less hardscrabble journalist inThe Devil Wears Prada. But it sounds like a promising action movie lead for the actress, who has has an intriguing career bouncing between rom-coms, superhero blockbusters, award-winning roles in musicals, and offbeat indie performances.
The Last Thing He Wantedis based on the romantic thriller novel by Didion published in 1996. The story centers around a Washington Post journalist who quits her job to look after her ailing father, but in a turn of events, finds herself recruited to be an arms dealer for the U.S. Government in Central America.
The screenplay for the film adaptation, penned byMarco Villalobos, appears to transport that story to the Middle East. Elevated’sCassian Elwesoptioned the book from Didion to develop it with Rees, after collaborating with her on the Oscar-nominatedMudbound. The film will be “a thrilling story of one woman, alone and unrelenting in a race against time,” according to a statement.
The Last Thing He Wantedwill be Rees' highly anticipated feature-film follow-up toMudbound, which scored four Academy Award nominations, including one for Rees' screenplay. Rees has proved to be one of the most exciting female directors working today. Even so, Oscar nominations don’t always herald career success for female directors — more often than not, acclaimed female directors end upworking in television or not getting work at all. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Rees. And with the movie industry steadily opening up to more positions for women behind and in front of the camera, this will hopefully be a sign of better things to come for female directors.
