Black Panther and Black Mirror breakout Letitia Wright has landed another significant role.
The British star is set to appear in The Silent Twins, the first stand-alone English-language feature from rising Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Anita Gou’s Kindred Spirit, which backed Honey Boy and The Farewell, is producing alongside U.K. management and production banner 42 and Poland’s Madants, with Protagonist Pictures handling international sales on the film. Rising star Tamara Lawrance (On Chesil Beach, The Long Song) has also joined the cast.
The Silent Twins is based on the lives of June and Jennifer Gibbons, real-life identical twins originally from the West Indies who grew up in Wales. The two became known as “the silent twins” because of their refusal to communicate with anyone other than each other. They developed their own language and became catatonic when separated.
The film will follow the girls as their isolation leads them to petty crime, violence and their eventual incarceration in the U.K.’s high-security mental health hospital Broadmoor, where they would be ferociously studied by doctors and psychologists, ignoring the protests of their family who argue they could lead a normal life. The girls developed a love-hate relationship and decided that the only way they could be truly free and be able to integrate into society, is if one of them died. Jennifer made the decision to take her own life, but the actual cause of death has remained a mystery ever since the tragedy.
Gou is producing alongside 42’s Ben Pugh and Joshua Horsfield and Madant’s Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska (High Life).
The Gibbons sisters have already been the subject of a TV drama, 1986’s The Silent Twins on the BBC, and the BBC documentary Silent Twin — Without My Shadow, which aired in 1994.
Smoczynska’s most recent film, Fugue, premiered in Cannes in 2018. Her debut, The Lure, a period horror musical romance about two flesh-eating mermaid sisters, won the special jury prize at Sundance in 2015.
The Silent Twins is one of several projects Wright has in the pipeline. She has a key role in Kenneth Branagh’s all-star retelling of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile for Disney, alongside a remake of the French hit Le Brio and sci-fi romance Hold Back the Stars alongside John Boyega. She’s also starring alongside Boyega in Steve McQueen’s high-profile BBC/Amazon drama Small Axe.
Wright is represented by WME and Identity Agency Group.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
