Capping off what has been a busy week for Legendary’s fledgling Enola Holmes movie, we now have word that Helena Bonham Carter of Harry Potter and The Crown fame has climbed aboard.
She’ll join an ensemble cast that currently consists of Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Godzilla: King of the Monsters) and, as of this afternoon, Henry Cavill, who has agreed to don the deerstalker hat as Sherlock Holmes himself. Much like Mycroft, the whip-smart detective will naturally take a back seat for Legendary’s spinoff; this is the story of Enola, the youngest member of the Holmes family who proves to be every bit as cunning as her surname would suggest.
As for Helena Bonham Carter, she’s reportedly signed on to play the part of Enola’s mother, for a story which sees the young sleuth embark on a case involving a “missing teen whose father has been murdered.”
The source of the story can be traced back to the Enola Holmes Mysteries book series by Nancy Springer, itself a wildly successful six-part saga involving the youngest detective of the Holmes family. It’s unclear exactly how faithful Jack Thorne’s script will be to the source material, but given the elevator pitch, we wouldn’t be too surprised if the end product drew from Springer’s The Case of the Missing Marquess from 2006.
Either way, this is shaping up to be a tantalizing project with an A-list cast to boot. We know Henry Cavill has just wrapped filming on The Witcher series for Netflix, with Millie Bobby Brown all finished with Stranger Things – for now, at least. Carter, meanwhile, still has The Crown on her plate, so we don’t expect this Enola Holmes adaptation to enter production in earnest until the latter stages of 2019.
