‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’: Ben Mendelsohn Joins the Psychological Thriller!!

Ben Mendelsohn is set to join fellow Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley in the psychological thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter from director Neil Burger (Limitless).

Elle Smith and Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) adapted Karen Dionne‘s novel of the same name, which follows a girl named Helena, whose father kept her and her mother captive in the wilderness for years. After a lifetime of trying to escape her past, the now-adult Helena (Ridley) is forced to face her demons when her father (Mendelsohn), the infamous “Marsh King,” unexpectedly returns.

Teddy Schwarzman‘s Black Bear Pictures will fully finance the film, which Schwarzman will produce with Anonymous Content’s Keith Redmon and Mark L. Smith. Black Bear’s Michael Heimler will executive produce alongside Charles Miller and Syndicate Entertainment’s Cliff Roberts. Production will start next month in Canada, and STX holds U.S. rights to the indie movie.

Mendelsohn is one of those mesmerizing actors you just can’t take your eyes off. Though he’s been acting since he was a teenager, his career really began to flourish following his turn in 2010’s Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom. Hollywood quickly took notice, and 2012 saw Mendelsohn starring opposite Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines, acting alongside Brad Pitt in Killing Them Softly, and popping up in Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises.

Since then, he has played the villain in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One, and he also starred in Captain Marvel. Mendelsohn will reprise his MCU role as Talos in the upcoming Disney+ series Secret Invasion, and he’ll soon be seen in Joe Wright‘s Cyrano as well as Damián Szifron’s thriller Misanthrope. I have mixed feelings about his recent HBO series The Outsider and whether it should return for a second season elsewhere, but I’m digging his casting as Ridley‘s father in The Marsh King’s Daughter, and have a feeling that Burger will make the most of their pairing. Mendelsohn‘s casting was first reported by Deadline.