Thanks in part to her award-winning work on Catastrophe, Sharon Horgan is more in demand than ever, creating and (sometimes) starring in other shows, including HBO's Divorce. She's making another leap, setting up her first film as a director.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl has adapted Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz's novel The New World, with Focus Features picking up rights to the book and throwing the film version into development. Horgan will direct a story that finds a woman named Jane dealing with the death of her husband, Jim. But he's not completely gone, as he had assigned his head to be frozen with a shadowy organization that promises to do away with mortality forever. Awake in a bucolic retreat – a sort of afterlife – Jim learns that the cost of eternal life is higher than he ever could have imagined. Meanwhile, stranded in the realm of the living and reeling from the loss of her husband, Jane sets out to get back his head.
It sounds like it could be a little bit Black Mirror in tone, looking at the implications of death and mortality, plus the impact on those left behind. It's early days for this one, and given Horgan's schedule, we don't yet know when it'll kick off shooting.
In other Horgan news, she's also working on another TV series, agreeing to develop an untitled show with John Hamburg and Ian Helfer for Amazon that would potentially see her as a socially awkward, broke single woman who launches a self-help company and recruits a handsome former gymnast (her Game Night co-star Billy Magnussen) to be the face of the venture. Catastrophe, meanwhile, should be back this year.
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