Ellen Burstyn And Emma Thompson Cast In Female-Fronted Peter Pan Film The Lost Girls

Men in Black International‘s Emma Thompson and her daughter Gaia Wise are among an ensemble cast of women set to star in the big-screen adaptation of Laurie Fox’s novel The Lost Girls, Deadline reports. Livia De Paolis will adapt the screenplay, direct, and star in the film. The trio will be joined by Ellen Burstyn in a story that takes place over four generations of Darling women, including Wendy of Peter Pan fame, as they all come to grips with having been spirited away to Neverland. De Paolis will play Wendy, who is “struggling to retain her creative spirit after her fantastical journeys with Pan.”

De Paolis is best known for her role in Emoticon 😉, which she also wrote and directed. Thompson’s role is described as basically a cameo, while Wise, who appeared in Last Chance Harvey and A Walk in the Woods, will likely play a more significant role given her age as a late teen, which would place her just at the tail end of Neverland opportunities.

“I have been fascinated with the hidden meanings of fairy tales since childhood, so when I read Laurie Fox’s novel The Lost Girls I was immediately on board with the way she reinvents J.M. Barrie’s timeless fairytale for a contemporary audience,” De Paolis said in a statement.

Per the plot synopsis, “Like her grandmother (Burstyn) and her mother Jane (Thompson in a cameo role), Wendy must escape Pan’s hold on her and the promises he desperately wants her to keep. As her daughter Berry (Wise) comes into Peter’s orbit, Wendy must fight to save her relationship with her daughter while reconciling her legacy.”

“We are delighted to be working with the producers and with writer/director Livia de Paolis, who has a vision for this retelling of the Peter Pan story in the Me Too era,” added executive producer Kirk D’Amico, who is working on the film for Myriad. “The strong material has attracted an equally strong cast including Emma Thompson and Gaia Wise and others to be added soon.”

It should be no surprise to comics fans, but should still be noted, that Fox’s novel has no connection to Lost Girls, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mash-up of young women from historical fiction from writer Alan Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie. That work was highly acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2006. Much of the non-critical discussion centered on nudity and lesbianism that appeared in the work.

There is no start date or projected release date as yet for De Paolis’s The Lost Girls.