Mark Ruffalo, best known for his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is set to co-star in a movie adaptation of Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s acclaimed novel Poor Things, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Yorgos Lanthimos, who was nominated for multiple Oscars for 2018’s The Favourite, will produce and direct the film. Other cast members include Oscar winner Emma Stone, who’s also a producer, and Willem Dafoe. No other casting news or prospective release date was announced at this early stage.
The strange, postmodernist novel, published in 1992, is framed as the memoirs of Victorian-era doctor Archibald McCandless, edited by Gray himself. McCandless meets a man, Godwin Baxter, who’s resurrected a drowned, pregnant woman, Bella Baxter, by surgically transplanting her fetus’ brain into her head. Baxter’s mind matures quickly, and she soon impulsively marries and travels abroad, where she encounters horrible injustices of the era; she eventually decides to study medicine herself. In an odd twist, McCandless’ widow, Victoria, claims in an epilogue that the story isn’t a memoir at all—it’s a fiction by her late husband, she says, that “stinks of Victorianism.”
“Gray has not only pulled off a stylistic tour de force, but has slyly slipped in a stunning critique of the late-19th-century,” wrote Kirkus’ reviewer. “A brilliant marriage of technique, intelligence, and art.” Gray, who died in 2019, won the Whitbread Novel Award for Poor Things.
Stone will likely play Baxter in the adaptation, but it’s unclear what roles Ruffalo and Dafoe will take on. Ruffalo won an Emmy last September for playing twin brothers in last year’s HBO miniseries adaptation of Wally Lamb’s 1998 bestseller, I Know This Much Is True.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
