Fox Searchlight has released the first image from the sci-fi film Pale Blue Dot, the feature directing debut of TV’s resident mind-bender Noah Hawley. The photo shows off Natalie Portman—who replaced Reese Witherspoon in the project back in January—in character as Lucy Cola, suited up in a NASA uniform.
Not a ton of info is out there about the film just yet, other than A) it revolves around a love triangle between an astronaut freshly returned from outer space and losing her grip on reality, her husband, and a colleague, and B) the cast is absolutely capital-letter Stacked. Besides Portman, Jon Hamm is onboard as the fellow astronaut who begins the affair, Zazie Beetz—having one hell of a year—will play a trainee who gets involved with this hot space mess, and Legion star Dan Stevens will re-team with Hawley to play Portman’s husband.
But this is Noah Hawley we’re talking about. Legend has it that the writer/director once tried to tell a story in a linear, straight-forward fashion and the effort nearly killed him. Anyone who has seen a second of Legion—or even Hawley’s Fargo TV adaptation, which isn’t as weird but certainly makes a point to be as inventive as possible in its storytelling—knows we’re not in for a straightforward love story among the stars here. There will be trickery. There will be time-jumping. The camera will be upside down for roughly 20% of the film’s runtime.
Either way, we probably don’t have to worry about Pale Blue Dot distinguishing itself from fellow upcoming NASA-set stories First Man from director Damien Chazelle and Hulu’s Sean Penn-led series The First.
Check out the image below.
Pale Blue Dot was written by Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, and also stars Ellen Burstyn, Colman Domingo, and Jeremiah Birkett.
via Collider