The Bard is heading to streaming service Amazon Prime Video, which has teamed with the BBC on an adaptation of “King Lear,” starring Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
The BBC commissioned the Shakespeare project; Amazon joined as a co-producer. Principal photography gets underway this month, with former HBO executive Colin Callender’s Playground on production duty, alongside theater producer Sonia Friedman’s production company.
Richard Eyre (“The Dresser”) has adapted the play and will direct. The TV film will be set in a fictional version of present-day England, with Hopkiasns the tragically capricious king and Thompson as his scheming eldest daughter, Goneril. The two actors starred together in 1993’s “The Remains of the Day,” for which both received Oscar nominations. Hopkins won the Best Actor statuette for “The Silence of the Lambs,” while Thompson picked up the Best Actress award for her performance in “Howards End.”
The starry “King Lear” cast also includes Emily Watson (“Theory of Everything”) as the king’s middle daughter, Regan, and Florence Pugh (“Marcella”) as youngest child Cordelia. Christopher Eccleston plays Oswald, Jim Broadbent takes the role of the Earl of Gloucester, and Andrew Scott plays his son Edgar.
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