Former Harry Potter actress Emily Watson has transitioned well from child actor to adult actor, choosing roles in a widening variety of genres over the last few years, and is currently filming Noah Baumbach’s latest comedic drama While We’re Young. So you might be surprised to learn that the latest movie Watson has signed on to star in is called…While We’re Young. It’s no typo, but it is a reteaming of Watson with her The Perks of Being a Wallflower director Steven Chbosky, who will be adapting the novel 29, When We Were Young by author Adena Halpern, reports Deadline.
It’ll be great to have Chbosky directing Watson again, although this is an entirely different territory. Halpern’s novels are known for being very popular among females. While We’re Young will follow Ellie Jerome, a woman in her seventies who has never lost her youthful essence, having more in common with Lucy, her 29-year-old granddaughter, than Barbara, her daughter. Through some bit of magic, a birthday wish comes true, and Ellie is 29 again, and though it’s different from what she expected, the power of age persuades her to leave everything she loved behind to be young again. While this isn’t the kind of story that usually draws me in, it sounds interesting to me. I like, many also miss the carelessness past years, though my thoughts skew a tad younger.
This will be the third feature for Chbosky, who created the cult series Jericho, and he’ll be working from a screenplay by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, who wrote 500 Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now, and the upcoming adaptation of John Green’s favored young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. I’d assume these guys should be able to forma well thought out script from the material at hand. It would be easy to get a little sexist and say the only thing worse than a man telling a woman’s story is having two men do it, but I don’t always think that.
This year, Watson was stealing people’s shit in both Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s This is the End and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. She’ll be seen soon with dreadlocks a plenty in Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic Noah, and will start production at some point on Francesca Gregorini’s struggling writer drama Your Voice in My Head.
Now we all know actors will often play a role that is a few years younger than their actual age, but is Watson going to be going up five years or so to play a 29-year-old? It wouldn’t be a far reach or anything, but it would be strange.
One thing’s for sure, though. They’re going to have to change the title on this thing, lest we have another Lee Daniels’ The Butler situation on our hands. Steven Chbosky’s While We’re Young just sounds weird.
