Peter Kosminsky will direct and Mark Rylance will star as Thomas Cromwell in an "intensely political" £7 million (about US$11.2 million), six-part BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which is expected to air in 2015. The Guardian reported that BBC "will also broadcast the sequel Bring Up the Bodies and producer Company Pictures has an option on the as-yet-unpublished final book of Mantel's Tudor trilogy, The Mirror and the Light."
"This is a first for me," Kosminsky said. "But it is an intensely political piece. It is about the politics of despotism, and how you function around an absolute ruler. I have a sense that Hilary Mantel wanted that immediacy."
Pairing Kosminsky with playwright Peter Straughan, who has adapted Mantel's work, "suggests the BBC is looking for a darker and grittier take on British history," the Guardian wrote.
"When I saw Peter Straughan's script, only a first draft, I couldn't believe what I was reading," Kosminsky added. "It was the best draft I had ever seen. He had managed to distil 1,000 pages of the novels into six hours, using prose so sensitively. He's a theater writer by trade."
Mantel called Straughan's scripts a "miracle of elegant compression and I believe with such a strong team the original material can only be enhanced."
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Meg Ryan, who played a children's bookseller in You've Got Mail, will star in and produce an NBC comedy "revolving around a former hotshot New York editor," according to the Hollywood Reporter, which noted that Ryan "will play a sunny, devoted and desperately non-confrontational single mom who decides to return to her New York publishing house where she was once a brilliant editor to find that she now works for Brenda, a neurotic 30-year-old who was once her former intern. Now she must find a way to keep her boss, her teenage kids, her almost ex-husband and her meddlesome mother-in-law all happy, which results in her overcomplicating every situation and somehow always making it worse."
