Daniels is to reunite with Sorkin for the first time since 'The Newsroom'.
Jeff Daniels is to reunite with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, after being cast as the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch in Sorkin’s upcoming Broadway adaptation of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.
Based on the late Harper Lee’s Great American novel of the same name, the new adaptation is being written by Sorkin, famous for his work on the scripts for TV series ‘The West Wing’ and films A Few Good Men, Moneyball, Steve Jobs and The Social Network, the latter of which he won an Oscar for.
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, co-produced by Scott Rudin and the Lincoln Center Theater, is to begin performances on November 1st on Broadway, at a venue that’s yet to be announced.
Jeff Daniels is to reunite with Aaron Sorkin in a new production of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
Celia Keenan-Bolger stars as Scout, Will Pullen as Jem, Gideon Glick as Dill and Stark Sands as prosecutor Horace Gilmer, in roles that had already been cast for the new adaptation. LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Dakin Matthews and Frederick Weller also feature.
The show will see 62 year old Daniels work with Sorkin, 56, for the first time since the end of 2014, when the HBO political drama ‘The Newsroom’ wrapped after three seasons. Daniels won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Character in a Drama Series for his role as news anchor Will McAvoy in 2013.
“We just finished two full labs of Aaron’s play, both directed by Bart [Sher], and both with this entire cast,” the show’s producer Rudin said in a statement on Friday (February 16th).
“It’s an extraordinarily rare occurrence that you can build a play on the people who will ultimately be in it, but that is what we were lucky enough to do… It’s a huge tribute to both Aaron and Bart that everybody we asked to be in the production also cleared their schedules to jump into a very beefy lab process with us, especially so far in advance of the play’s production.”
Rudin also added that the casting of Daniels in the lead role, as the soft-spoken Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch who defends a black man accused of rape, was their only choice.
“We never talked about anybody but Jeff, from the very first conversation Aaron and I ever had about doing this together,” the producer added. “He’s a theatre animal like Fredric March was a theatre animal, or Jason Robards, or George C. Scott.”
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