Steven Knight is a busy, busy man. He wrote last year’s Princess Diana biopic Spencer (for which Kristen Stewart just received an Oscar nomination), you can find his Jason Momoa-starring dystopian series See on Apple TV+, and his sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders arrives on BBC One next week. In regards to what’s next, we now know a lot more about a new collaboration between Knight and the Beeb – an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic coming-of-age story Great Expectations – and who’s going to be in it.
The six-part series – a co-production between the BBC and FX – will star the also newly Oscar nominated (for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter) Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham, and Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead as orphan Pip. Also announced as joining the cast are Toast Of London’s Matt Berry, Adult Material star Hayley Squires, Top Boy’s Ashley Thomas, The Tourist and Line Of Duty actor Shalom Brune-Franklin and Killing Eve’s Owen McDonnell. Not a bad line-up, then.
This is the second Dickens adaptation written by Knight for the BBC, after his limited series version of A Christmas Carol in 2019. Knight is also on executive producing duty, with others including Tom Hardy and Ridley Scott, and This Is Going To Hurt’s Lucy Forbes will be the lead director. It will follow the final small screen outing for Peaky, as well as Knight's World War II drama SAS: Rogue Heroes, which stars Alfie Allen, Connor Swindells and Jack O'Connell, set to arrive (also on BBC) later in 2022. There’s no air date confirmed for Great Expectations as of yet – but as the series is still in the early stages of development we (greatly) expect it will be near the end of this year at the very least.