Natalie Portman and Alma Har’el to team up for new TV series
The victim will be played by Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o.
By HANNAH BROWNNATALIE PORTMAN teams up with Alma Har’el.(photo credit: TONY GENTILE/REUTERS)
Oscar-winning Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman will star in a limited series for Apple TV+ based on Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel, Lady in the Lake, and it will be directed and cowritten by Israeli Alma Har’el, according to a report in Deadline.Portman, who is currently filming Thor: Love and Thunder, will play Maddie Schwartz, a housewife in 1960s Baltimore, who leaves her comfortable life to become an investigative journalist and who makes it her mission to solve a cold case involving the murder of a young African-American woman.The victim will be played by Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o.Portman and Nyong’o will also be executive producers on the series, with Sophie Mas.Portman directed, adapted and starred in the film version of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, and also has 10 previous producing credits. In 2018, when presenting the Best Director Award at the Golden Globes, Portman emphasized the lack of women directors by saying, “And here are the all-male nominees.”Har’el is best known for the critically acclaimed coming-of-age drama Honey Boy, written by and starring Shia LaBeouf, for which she won the Directors Guild of America Award for best first feature film.Like Portman, she is an outspoken advocate for women getting more opportunities to direct, and created the nonprofit Free The Bid in 2016 to promote global hiring of female directors in advertising, which then developed into Free the Work.FTW advocates for more than 2,000 underrepresented filmmakers in 21 countries worldwide.
