With Ewan McGregor busy preparing to make the Philip Roth adaptation American Pastoral as his directorial debut, he’s adding more cast members to the ensemble. In his latest round of hires, he has Orange Is The New Black’s Uzo Aduba ready to jump aboard alongside David Strathairn, Peter Riegert and Valorie Curry.
Set during the Vietnam War years, American Pastoral follows Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov (McGregor), a once all-conquering high-school athlete, who’s married to a beauty queen (Jennifer Connelly) and runs the business he’s inherited from his dad. All seems well in Swede’s world until his daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning) joins the countercultural clamour of the time, signing up as a revolutionary and committing a fatal act of violence that throws all their lives into chaos.
Lakeshore Entertainment has been trying to get this one on to screens since 2003, as it had been languishing at Paramount and the studio let the option lapse. It has since been through the directorial hands of Fisher Stevens and then Phillip Noyce. But it’s McGregor who will finally make it, working from a script by John Romano, and kicking off shooting later this month in Pittsburgh.