Double, double, toil and trouble, etcetera etcetera! Per Deadline, Joel Coen will write and direct an adaptation of Macbeth for A24, with Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington in talks to star. In Shakespeare’s tragedy — which you definitely read and did not just SparkNotes-skim in high school — a trio of witches convinces Macbeth that he’s destined to be king of Scotland, and he and his ambitious wife scheme and murder for the throne. Variety reports that Washington would play the lord, and McDormand would play his wife.
The Macbeth adaptation will be Joel Coen’s first movie without his brother and writing/producing/directing partner Ethan Coen. (Their most recent film together was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, for Netflix.) There have been plenty of big screen adaptations of Macbeth, most notably Orson Welles’s in 1948, while McDormand played Lady Macbeth onstage in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre production in 2016. A24’s Macbeth will reportedly begin shooting before the end of this year.