Mark Ruffalo Joins Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things

Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo will star opposite Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos adaptation of the Alasdair Gray novel, Poor Things.

Willem Defoe will also star, with Rami Yousef rumored to be joining the cast as well. There’s no confirmation on Ruffalo’s role, but the cast is shaping up to be star-studded, just like previous Lanthimos films.

Variety also reports that Tony McNamara, who earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing The Favourite, will adapt the novel, while Stone will produce under her Fruit Tree banner. There is no specific date for when production begins, but the film is expected to premiere in 2022.

Poor Things’ story is a bit complex, but to break it down in simple terms: the story is a reimagining of Frankenstein—wherein Bella Baxter is resurrected from the dead by a surgeon who swaps Bella’s brain with that of her unborn child.

For a better understanding of the story, Collider goes in-depth and provides some context on just how wacky this plot is:

“Bella is Victoria Blessington, who drowns herself to escape her abusive husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington. However, a surgeon resuscitates her by removing the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placing it into her skull, giving the revived Bella the child’s mental faculties. Eventually, she becomes engaged to a Glasgow physician named Archibald McCandless. She then chloroforms only to run off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure all over Europe. As Bella’s brain matures, she starts to develop a social conscience, but all the progress she has made is threatened when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband.”

At first, I was like WTF, but this is a project helmed by Yorgos Lanthinmos, and this kind of shit is right up his alley. He knows what to do with material like this. There hasn’t been a film of the director I didn’t love.

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