Rather than taking a well-earned breather from Bond post-Spectre, Daniel Craig is throwing himself into another massive project. He's signed up to star in the TV series Purity, based on the novel by Jonathan Franzen. Todd Field is aboard to direct and co-write (with Franzen), with Scott Rudin producing.
Franzen's book, published last year, involves the titular Purity "Pip" Tyler, riddled with student debt, living with anarchists in California and enduring a toxic relationship with her reclusive mother. A chance encounter with a German peace activist leads to a job with the mysterious Sunlight Project, trafficking "all the secrets of the world", which Pip hopes includes who her father is. Along the way she begins an intense connection with the dangerously charismatic political renegade Andreas Wolf, who began the project and is now hiding out in Bolivia.
"Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder," runs the blurb. "The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters - Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers - and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes."
Rudin is setting the series up himself through his Scott Rudin Productions, and has significant interest from several platforms including Netflix, Showtime, FX, and presumably Fox, where Rudin has a first-look deal. Purity is being referred to as a limited series although there's talk of at least 20 episodes. How many of those Field would helm remains to be seen, but it's a significant return for a talented director whose last film, Little Children, is now a decade old.
The size of the Purity undertaking means many are now sounding the death knell of Craig's Bond, but that's still not yet official. There's no start date for Purity yet, and no further cast. Expect announcements about the key role of Pip and the series' eventual home in the near future.