Mad Men star Christina Hendricks – she of the flaming red hair and hourglass figure – has signed on to co-star alongside Josh Duhamel and Katherine Heigl in Greg Berlanti’s gloomy-sounding romance, Life As We Know It.
The film will star Duhamel and Heigl - both of whom also graduated to movie stardom from TV shows; so they're shining examples for Hendricks - as two single people who are thrown together when their mutual best friends (one of whom will be played by Hendricks) are killed in an accident. Having been named caregivers for the late couple’s orphaned daughter, the duo find themselves thrown together in distressing circumstances, from which a relationship forms.
Yes, that’s the plot – in which a seemingly adult and responsible couple leave the care of their daughter to two separate people, apparently as part of some elaborate scheme from beyond the grave to get their two best friends to hook up. It’s like Guardian Soulmates, but with actual souls. And it’s icky as all get out.
But that’s just an early, sight unseen, reaction. We’re sure that Berlanti, writer of the forthcoming **Green Lantern **movie and a guy with plenty of TV experience on shows like Brothers & Sisters, will handle the material more sensitively and realistically than that. Monster’s Ball, for example, explored the attachments that can form in the cauldron of grief.
But if the hideous death of a couple really does turn out to be nothing more than some warped meet cute, then there could be a problem.
Ian Reitchman and the wonderfully-named Kristin ‘Farley’s’ Rusk Robinson wrote the script. Heigl will executive produce, along with her mother, Nancy.
Filming will begin in Atlanta later in the autumn.