Jenna Ortego in Talks to Star in Taika Waititi's Sci-Fi Film KLARA AND THE SUN
Wednesday and Beetlejuice 2 star Jenna Ortega is reportedly in talks to star in director Taika Waititi’s upcoming sci-fi film project Klara and the Sun.
Klara and the Sun will be a film adaptation of Never Let Me Go author Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 bestselling novel of the same name. The project is said to be in development at Sony's 3000 Pictures imprint, with Dahvi Waller writing the script.
Klara and the Sun centers on Klara, a robot girl who is created to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely. This is the story of how she tries to save a family of humans she lives with from heartbreak. I assume that Ortega will play Klara in the film
The description of the book reads: “Here is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that 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?”
The author of the book talked about his story in an interview with NPR, saying: "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."
Producers on the project will be Waititi, Garrett Basch, and David Heyman for Heyday Films. Ishiguro will executive produce.