Casey Affleck Set To Star in Director Joe Wright’s STONER

Casey Affleck has signed on to star in his first movie since winning the Best Actor Oscar for his heavy and emotional role in Manchester By the Sea. The film is called Stoner and it will be directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, Hanna, The Soloist). The movie is based on a novel by the same name written by Jon Williams. 

The story will follow the life of William Stoner, “a dirt-poor farmer turned academic, who emerges as an unlikely existential hero while making his way through the first half of the 20th Century.”

Producer Jason Blum has this to say in a statement: 

“Because the novel is so beautiful but not well-known, fans of ‘Stoner’ feel like they’re in a secret club. I’m so excited that Casey, Joe and Andrew have come aboard to help expand this club’s membership. This quintessentially American work is being brought to the screen by a terrific international team and we’re confident their combined perspectives will add rich layers to this moving story.”

Blum has definitely brought together a great team of creative talent to bring this story to life. It seems like the perfect project for Wright and Affleck to take on, and if done right, it’s one of those projects that could get all kinds of award nominations.

Here’s the description fro the book with more details regarding the story and the character that it’s built around:

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

This has got Oscar bait written all over it.

Source: Variety

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