Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) is beginning to assemble his star-studded cast for The Favourite, a new period drama set to explore the defining reign of Queen Anne toward the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th.
As previously reported, The Light Between Oceans star Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman and the Oscar-winning Emma Stone are all on board for Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Deadline now brings word that Nicholas Hoult, star of Mad Max: Fury Road and Fox’s flagship (dormant?) X-Men franchise, has closed a deal to play Robert Harley.
Harley was leader of the Tory party at the time, and served under Queen Anne (Colman) as Lord High Treasurer. Elsewhere, Weisz, is attached to the part of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a close confidant to her majesty throughout her time on the throne, while Stone will portray the poverty-stricken Abigail Masham. A distant relative to Weisz’s Sarah, Stone’s character was suddenly drafted in and given a position at court, eventually spawning a dramatic shift in power as Anne’s reign witnessed the Treaty Of Union along with the Union Of The Parliaments, which would lead to the creation of Great Britain we know today.
Featuring a script penned by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, filming on The Favourite is expected to get underway later in 2017. As for Hoult, he’s still mulling over a potential return to the X-Men franchise, while there are also roles in Watership Down, Sand Castle, Rebel in the Rye and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War cramming up the pipeline.
