The adaption of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel, got its trailer out today, featuring a powerful performance from Academy Award nominee Michael Fassbender (X-Men: Apocalypse, 12 Years a Slave) and Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, The Dark Knight Rises) as the doomed warrior-turned-king, Macbeth is filled with breathtaking battles.
Macbeth, a duke of Scotland, receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders his king and takes the throne for himself.
Marion Cotillard is the first French actress to play Lady Macbeth on film in an English-language adaptation and the second to play the character in a British production after Simone Signoret played her on stage in 1966, at the Royal Court Theatre. Signoret and Cotillard is the only French actress to win a Best Actress Oscar.
Although Lady Macbeth’s nationality is never mentioned on Shakespeare’s play, it’s presumed that she is Scottish. For the film, Marion Cotillard kept her French accent. Producer Iain Canning explained that her casting added another layer of the film, “it has allowed us, at the center of this story, to place a character who has an otherness, there’s a slight sense of separation now, in Lady Macbeth, that she exists in the community but somehow has a slightly different agenda to the other women in that community. It adds complexity to the Lady Machbeth role”, he said. Scotland had many French Queen Consorts, which would be plausible for Lady Macbeth to be French.
Macbeth co-stars David Thewlis (The Theory of Everything), Elizabeth Debicki (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), Jack Reynor (Transformers: Age of Extinction), Sean Harris (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) and Paddy Considine (Child 44).
Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie and Todd Louiso wrote the script with Laura Hastings-Smith producing alongside See-Saw’s Iain Canning and Emile Sherman. The Weinstein Co. is releasing the film domestically.
Fassbender, Kurzel and Lesslie are re-uniting to work on Assassin’s Creed, the New Regency live-action adaptation of the Ubisoft video game.
The film received a standing ovation at the end of its screening at the 68th Cannes Film Festival.
It is going to be in theaters on 4th of December.
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