Mark Rylance to star in Steven Spielberg’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

When Steven Spielberg loves to work with you, there's a very good chance that that relationship will span several movies. After working with Mark Rylance on both BRIDGE OF SPIES and THE BFG, Deadline is reporting that Steven Spielberg and Mark Rylance will be reuniting for a third film, an adaption of David I. Kertzer's "The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara".

The novel tells the story of a young Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy in 1858 who is forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian after it's discovered he had been secretly baptized. Mortara's parents' struggle to free their son becomes a part of a much larger political battle which pits the Papacy against the forces of democracy and Italian unification. Mark Rylance will star in the film as Pope Pius IX and Tony Kushner (LINCOLN) will be penning the script. After Steven Spielberg completes work on READY PLAYER ONE, which is looking to shoot this summer, it's expected that he will then begin work on THE KIDNAPPING OF EDGARDO MORTARA.

A synopsis of the novel via Amazon:

A police posse, acting on the orders of a Catholic inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. As Edgardo's parents desperately search for a way to get their son back, they learn why he–out of all their eight children–was taken. Years earlier, the family's Catholic serving girl, fearful that the infant might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him (or so she claimed). Edgardo recovered, but when the story reached the Bologna Inquisitor, the result was his order for Edgardo to be seized and sent to a special monastery where Jews were converted into good Catholics. His justification in Church teachings: No Christian child could be raised by Jewish parents. The fate of this one boy came to symbolize the entire revolutionary campaign of Mazzini and Garibaldi to end the dominance of the Catholic Church and establish a modern, secular Italian state.

Steven Spielberg's THE BFG will hit theaters on July 1, 2016.