Ralph Fiennes is in talks to join Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) and Helena Bonham Carter in Mike Newell’s adaptation of Great Expectations. Daily Mail reports that Fiennes is up for the role of the mysterious Magwitch, but also notes that Fiennes is currently set to play Prospero in Trevor Nunn’s version of The Tempest at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Because Newell plans to shoot in London starting in August, if Fiennes takes the role, he would have to shoot his scenes during the day and then do his stage performances in the evening.
As we reported back in February, Fiennes is also in talks to join Sam Mendes’ untitled James Bond flick and those negotiations are still ongoing. He’ll next be seen in theaters this July playing some guy named “Voldemort” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. Hit the jump for a synopsis of Great Expectations.
Here’s the synopsis for Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations:
Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations between his terrifying experience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and his humiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham’s beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can’t buy. Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens’s abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.