There is some serious talent headed towards Oxford and the world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In a slew of casting news to get you daemon jumping, the BBC and Bad Wolf TV adaptation has added Tom Hooper, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Dafne Keen to its world of all creatures great and small.
Entertainment Weekly report that the creator of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is close to signing on to play hot-air balloonist Lee Scoresby, while The King’s Speech‘s Oscar winning director Tom Hooper is negotiating a deal to oversee all eight episodes of the ambitious fantasy series.
If that wasn’t exciting enough, Deadline have revealed that His Dark Materials has also found its Lyra Belacqua in the shape of Logan breakout Dafne Keen.
A dimension spanning fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials is the story of a young orphan named Lyra, who sets off on an adventure to find her missing friend, encountering witches, polar bear armies, and a particularly nasty golden monkey.
New Line Cinema attempted to launch the franchise with 2007’s The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, the perfectly cast Eva Green, and the voice of Sir Ian McKellen, but it failed to find a way adapting the myriad of ideas found within Pullman’s pages into a 90 minute film. The BBC and Bad Wolf production is trying something similarly ambitious by having the eight-part series depict all three His Dark Materials books — Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass – with filming set to get underway shortly.
Are you hoping that they can finally do justice to Pullman’s source material? What do you think of the casting choices? Are you worried that eight episodes isn’t nearly enough to tell a complex three-book arc? Let us know what you think in the comments section…