Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay Team Up Again in Fantasy Classic ‘A Wrinkle in Time’; DuVernay Set to
Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay are set to team up again - this time in Disney’s upcoming A Wrinkle in Time. DuVernay, who directed Winfrey in Selma, is set to direct her idol in a new adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 Newbery Medal-winning book. Winfrey is in final negotiations to play Mrs. Which, the oldest and leader of the trio of mysterious ladies that send Madeline L’Engle’s young protagonists' on their tesseracting journeys through time and space, the indistinct but powerful Mrs. Which is usually described as a vague, shimmering light in the shape of an old woman.
In a 2003, a made-for-TV adaptation of the book was directed by John Kent Harrison and distributed by Disney. But what will make this A Wrinkle in Time distinctly different from the 2003 version is the casting. In the TV adaptation, the principal cast was mostly Caucasian with the exception of Alfre Woodard who played Mrs. Whatsit.
DuVernay, on the other hand, has made it very clear that her mission is to lead the way towards a more inclusive Hollywood. She recently hired an all-female directorial team for the OWN drama series Queen Sugar which she co-created and executive produced with Winfrey.
Regarding Queen Sugar, Winfrey told Entertainment Weekly last week, "Ava called me up and said, 'Look, I have this idea for inclusiveness. Let's do something that's never been done before.”
And this trend is clearly carrying over into A Wrinkle in Time with Aisha Coley serving as casting director. Coley has casted several of DuVernay’s key projects including Selma, Middle of Nowhere, I Will Follow and Queen Sugar. Coley is also known for casting Beyond the Lights, The Secret Life of Bees and Akeelah and the Bee.
A Wrinkle In Time, penned by Oscar-winning Frozen writer Jennifer Lee, involves a young girl whose scientist father has gone missing after working on a mysterious project called a tesseract, which involves being transported to a fifth dimension with mysterious inhabited planets. She takes part in a search for her father and sees some incredible creatures along the way.
Disney is moving quickly to cast the film. Amy Adams and Kevin Hart are among those being considered.
Having DuVernay on the director for this film is a big win for Disney Motion Pictures president Sean Bailey and executive vice president of production Tendo Nagenda who’s steering the film and whose recent projects include Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast which is set to be released March 2017.
For Winfrey’s part, she has been acting quite a bit lately. She took on a recent supporting role on her OWN network’s Greenleaf, and will soon appear in Lee Daniels’ Richard Pryor biopic and the recently announced HBO adaptation of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.
