Casting is now underway for the adaptation of the 2017 best-selling novel The Women in the Castle. Assembling an impressive international cast, Nina Hoss, Daisy Ridley, and Kristin Scott Thomas are set to star in the film which centers on three widows who are involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Deadline reports.
The novel was written by Jessica Shattuck and the adaptation will be directed and penned by Jane Anderson, who recently wrote the screenplay for the Glenn Close-led drama The Wife. She is also a two-time Emmy winner for her work on The Positively True Adventures of the Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and Olive Kitteridge. Ridley was last seen in Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker, while Kristin Scott Thomas will be playing Mrs. Danvers in Ben Wheatley’s upcoming remake of Rebecca, coming to Netflix next month. Meanwhile, Hoss is no stranger to World War II films, considering her tour-de-force performance in 2015’s Phoenix, where she played a concentration camp survivor.
See the book’s synopsis below via Amazon.
Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.
First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.
As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.