Though she’s been spending time on smaller screens via sadly cancelled HBO drama Enlightened, Laura Dern has not ignored cinemas. She’s now signed on to Reese Witherspoon’s latest, **Wild.
The film, which Jean-Marc Vallée is now directing, is adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir. Wild sees a young woman dealing with divorce, the emotional scars of her mother’s death and her drug addiction issues, decides to hike the 1000-mile Pacific Crest trail on her own, in the hope that it will give her some direction in life.
Of course, things didn’t go exactly to plan, but she still learned a lot along the way. Nick Hornby, no stranger to having his own books filmed (and, more recently, scripting adaptations), wrote the screenplay.
Dern is set to play Witherspoon’s mother in the film in what we assume will be flashback scenes... unless there’s a zombie subplot we don’t know about. She joins a cast that includes Gaby Hoffman, Thomas Sadoski and W. Earl Brown. The actress most recently worked on The Fault In Our Stars and has When The Game Stands Tall moving through post-production.