Normal People, One of the Year's Buzziest Books, is Becoming a Hulu Miniseries
Hulu has announced that Sally Rooney's best-selling novel Normal People will become a Hulu miniseries.
Rooney herself is part of the team adapting the novel for the small screen.
It might not seem possible for Sally Rooney and her second novel, Normal People, to get any buzzier. Her latest work was nominated for last year's Man Booker prize and won two British Book Awards-including Best Overall Book, for which she beat out Michelle Obama's memoir. The author even got an endorsement from Taylor Swift, who said reading Rooney is "like being inside somebody’s mind."
But Sally Rooney and Normal People's meteoric rise has only just begun. Yesterday, the streaming service Hulu announced that they will produce, along with the BBC, a twelve-part miniseries based on the book.
A tenderhearted page-turner, Normal People portrays the on-again-off-again romance between two Irish teenagers, Marianne and Connell, as they by turns sidestep and succumb to social pressures. Though an ornery outcast, Marianne is affluent, while Connell is the son of her housekeeper.
In our review of Normal People in the April issue of O, we wrote that readers “can’t help but get caught up in its deft emotional dance. These are characters you’ll worry about, root for.”
Rooney herself is adapting the novel for the screen, along with writers Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, while Lenny Abrahamson will be at the director’s helm. Abrahamson is no stranger to making great literature into cinematic gold: in 2016, he directed Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s bestseller, which featured a star-making (and Oscar-winning) turn by Brie Larson.
“As a longtime admirer of Lenny Abrahamson’s work, it’s a special privilege for me to be working alongside him on the adaptation of Normal People," Rooney said in a statement.
Cast in the lead roles are Daisy Edgar-Jones (War of the Worlds) and newcomer Paul Mescal, who will be making his television debut as Connell. To share the news, Mescal posted this adorably Connell-esque reaction:
Shooting has already begun on the Normal People miniseries, which Hulu says will drop some time in 2020. That means there’s plenty of time to read the novel-though you won’t need very much; the book is so engrossing that the pages fly.
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