When he’s done promoting the James Franco real-life rock-climbing drama/thriller 127 HOURS, filmmaker Danny Boyle is jumping into some classic material, but not another movie.
As we first heard at the beginning of the year, Boyle (SUNSHINE, TRAINSPOTTING, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) is adapting FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley’s macabre classic about an obsessed scientist and his horrific reanimated creation. But you’ll have to be in London next February to see it, since Boyle is taking it to the Olivier stage at the National Theatre.
Boyle has Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Jonny Lee Miller (TRAINSPOTTING) starring in the show, but which characters will they play? Why not both? In a novel way to keep the show fresh, “One night one will be [the monster] Frankenstein, while the other will play his creator Victor,” Boyle tells the Daily Mail.
The show was previously described as a “huge scale, theatrically and visually ambitious event”. Cross your fingers the rest of us somehow get to see Boyle’s vision of the tale in some incarnation one day.
The director has been considering several film projects, but his Frankenstein will obviously keep him busy for a bit (at least it reunites him with Sick Boy). Meanwhile, Cumberbatch’s “Sherlock” co-star Martin Freeman will be occupied for a while with wandering Middle Earth as Bilbo Baggins in THE HOBBIT.