'Women In The Castle': Daisy Ridley & Kristin Scott Thomas To Star In Film Adaptation Of Bestseller

One day, Lionsgate will release Chaos Walking, the long-delayed film adaptation of the young adult novel which stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. Filming wrapped in late 2017, around the same time that author Jessica Shattuck's book, The Women in the Castle, was on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, in the wake of the Skywalker saga, former Star Wars star Daisy Ridley has been cast in a movie adaptation of Shattuck's novel. Learn more about the project below.

Deadline says Ridley has been cast alongside Kirstin Scott Thomas (The English Patient, Darkest Hour) and Nina Hoss (Homeland, A Most Wanted Man) in a movie version of The Women in the Castle, a movie about three widows of men who failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Here's the synopsis from Amazon:

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin's mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister's wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband's resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.

Jane Anderson, who won multiple Emmys for writing HBO's Olive Kitteridge and who also wrote the Glenn Close film The Wife and has writing and producing credits on Mad Men, is set to write and direct this adaptation. Rosalie Swedlin (The Wife), Doreen Wilcox Little (Mapplethorpe), and Michael Scheel (Inglorious Basterds) are all lined up to produce, and filming gets underway early next year.

This will be Ridley's first "grown-up" movie since 2018's Ophelia, the reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stay tuned to find out whether she decides to adopt a German accent for her role here.