Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville is taking on the role of late children’s author Roald Dahl in an untitled biopic.
Filmmaker John Hay is directing a movie about the beloved British writer and his actress wife Patricia Neal based on Stephen Michael Shearer’s Neal biography An Unquiet Life. It will center on the couple’s life as Dahl pens some of his most famous works, including James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Neal returns to acting in the 1960s, according to Variety.
“Personally, I can’t imagine anyone better than Hugh Bonneville to give the ambivalent nature of Roald Dahl’s life (sic),” producer Elliot Jenkins says. “He was such a man of wounded parts below his polished veneer of self-confidence.”
The project, which will be presented to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival later this month (May17), was co-written by Hay and David Logan. Production is slated to begin later this year (17).
