Luster, Raven Leilani’s best-selling, award-winning debut novel, is getting the TV remedy. Tessa Thompson’s manufacturing firm Viva Maude and the studio Gaumont (Narcos Mexico, Lupin) are teaming as much as adapt the work for HBO, Deadline reviews. The information comes simply over a yr after the guide’s 2020 launch.
Praised for its sharp humor and gutting honesty, Luster facilities on Edie, a Black artist dwelling in Brooklyn and scrambling via her twenties—the awkward sexual escapades, the office woes of her admin job, her run-down residence, all of it. She begins an affair with Eric, a white man in his forties in a quasi-open marriage; however their relationship turns into much more sophisticated when Edie motion pictures in with him and his spouse, Rebecca, in a New Jersey suburb and kinds an surprising bond with their adopted Black daughter, Akila.
Previously speaking to ELLE.com, Leilani defined how she crafted Edie with relatable struggles, messes, and flaws—utilizing a trope usually reserved for white feminine characters in media.
“Basically, after we’re speaking about ladies, ‘unlikeable’ is a approach of claiming that we get to be aware of the darkness of her inside thoughts. She will get to be complicated, she will get to be indignant, and it has completely different baggage when the girl is Black. I wished to talk to that rage—that was the origin of Edie, rage. It’s humorous that it type of turned humor. What we name unlikeability in white ladies, I feel Black ladies really feel, however should suppress with a view to survive. It felt like I needed to be very cautious, however on the similar time I attempted to not watch out. I attempted to be free.”
Whereas casting particulars for HBO’s Luster are nonetheless unknown, the behind-the-scenes group is already coming collectively. Thompson and Kishori Rajan (Viva Maude’s Vice President of Growth and Manufacturing and government producer of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness) are government producing. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lincoln Middle Rising Artist Award-winning theater director Lileana Blain-Cruz are writing the script. The pair beforehand labored collectively on the Obie-winning play Marys Seacole.
In an announcement to Deadline, Thompson praised Leilani as “a seminal voice for her technology.” She added: “In her work, which defies categorization, there may be an astonishingly singular high quality that speaks to spirit of the kinds of narratives Viva Maude goals to showcase—daring, fantastically crafted, unapologetically human, imaginative and unconventional—it’s thrilling to be teamed with Gaumont and the gorgeous skills of Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lileana Blain-Cruz to develop this story at HBO, the proper residence.”
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