Jenna Ortega is set to star in another high-profile project, with the in-demand star looking to lead the cast of Taika Waititi‘s latest project — alongside the six-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams, as reported by Deadline — in the ambitious adaptation of the sci-fi novel, Klara and the Sun. The story follows the titular character, a robot girl whose purpose is to prevent teenagers from feeling lonely in their lives. The novel was a New York Times bestseller and was written by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ortega is a very busy actress at the moment, so busy in fact she recently had to drop out of the upcoming — and now, very troubled — Scream 7 due to scheduling conflicts. She is also starring in Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice 2, is currently working on a second season of Netflix‘s Addams Family spin-off, Wednesday, alongside Burton, and will next be seen in Miller’s Girl, a dramatic film alongside Martin Freeman.
Adams will next be seen starring in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch for Searchlight, releasing in fall 2024, while Waititi has just released Next Goal Wins for Searchlight Pictures, and has also appeared in the second season of Our Flag Means Death. He also has several upcoming projects including Interior Chinatown, a new Star Wars, and a Time Bandits series, to name but a few — although he has stated he will be stepping away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the time being.
What Is Klara and the Sun About?
Klara and the Sun follows its title character, “an Artificial Friend” created with the purpose of ensuring that teenagers don’t become lonely. So, when a new family takes her in, Klara does her best to spare them from heartbreak. Per Penguin Random House, the book “offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?” Ishiguro explained in an interview with NPR exactly what the appeal behind creating the novel was:
“I think I’ve always been drawn to – you know, throughout my career to narrators who are, in one way or the other, quite a bit on the outside. But Klara was especially interesting for me because she doesn’t bring any baggage with her. It’s not like, you know, she has her value system which kind of clashes with what she finds. She’s like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she’s quite childlike and very open. And so that was – you know, it’s not just the way, the very restricted way, in which she actually reads the world that appealed to me. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her. I wanted her to remain, like, a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world, even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies.”
Collider will have more updates on Klara and the Sun when they become available.
via Collider