Taylor Jenkins Reid fans, rejoice! Netflix announced back in March 2022 that it's adapting Reid's best-selling novel "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" into a movie. At the time, the streamer shared that the adaptation will be written by Liz Tigelaar, who served as the showrunner for other book-to-screen adaptations like "Little Fires Everywhere" and "Tiny Beautiful Things." Netflix also revealed that Reid will serve as executive producer on the film alongside Margaret Chernin. And on June 29, the highly anticipated movie finally got a director: Leslye Headland.
Headland co-created the Netflix series "Russian Doll" with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler [1], and directed 2015's rom-com "Sleeping with Other People." She also created the upcoming Star Wars TV series "The Acolyte." [2]
For those curious about what to expect from the upcoming "Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" movie, Netflix's synopsis reads: "In a long-awaited interview with a young journalist, Evelyn Hugo, an aging Hollywood starlet, pulls back the curtain on her seven marriages, and as she tells tales of Hollywood scandals, betrayals, and woe, she unveils shocking truths about her own life and the lives of everyone around her." There's been no official casting news just yet — though fans have many names on their dream cast list [3] — and there's no word on when fans can expect to watch the film.
Reid's book [4] was first released in 2017 and has since grown a massive following of fans. That year, it won the Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction, and it's become a perennial favorite on BookTok. Freeform was previously working on an adaptation but Reid confirmed [5] in 2021 that they no longer had a series in the works. Meanwhile, another of Reid's novels, "Daisy Jones & the Six," [6] was adapted into a miniseries for Amazon Prime Video and released this past March. Many of Reid's other books [7] also have adaptations in the works.
Back in March, Reid gave Netflix's movie script her stamp of approval. When the Associated Press [8] asked her if she ever worried about how her sprawling story could fit into a movie, she admitted, "I did." But, she explained, "Then I read the script and I'm not concerned . . . Liz Tigelaar, who wrote the script, is a phenomenal talent, and I said, 'I don't know how you're going to do this. I think you need to condense the story.' And she said, 'No, I don't.' ... And then she turns in the script and I was like, 'I was wrong. You were right. You got it.'" She added at the time that there was a "short list of women" she had in mind to play Evelyn and Celia St. James in the film.
