British Vogue’s October cover star, Florence Pugh, is moving full steam ahead: She’s about to break your heart in We Live in Time opposite Andrew Garfield, and then, come next spring, deliver knock-out blows while reprising the part of Marvel’s deliciously deadpan Yelena Belova in Thunderbolts*. And she’s not stopping there—Netflix has now confirmed that she’ll also be taking center stage in a hotly-anticipated new series based on a literary classic: the sweeping, tragic East of Eden.
Per Variety, this forthcoming, seven-part reimagining of John Steinbeck’s 1952 magnum opus will “explore the multigenerational saga of the Trask family,” farmers who settle in California’s Salinas Valley in the early 20th century, “focusing new attention on its indelible antihero, Cathy Ames.”
In the novel, Cathy is depicted as evil incarnate—a swooningly beautiful blonde who is fully aware of the power she has over people. As a teenager she burns down her family home, killing her parents; entrances and then marries the novel’s hero, Adam; seduces his brother, Charles; gets pregnant and unsuccessfully attempts to abort it; and flees her family soon after giving birth to twins, shooting her husband in the shoulder when he attempts to stop her. She then changes her name to Kate, begins working in a brothel, poisons its madam, and takes over, transforming it into a den of sexual sadism. Her story eventually ends with her committing suicide.
It’s a meaty part that a number of formidable actors have gotten their teeth into in the past: Jo Van Fleet won a best-supporting-actress Oscar for playing Cathy in Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden, co-starring James Dean, while Bond girl Jane Seymour snagged a Golden Globe nod for her own saucy portrayal in a 1981 miniseries. But, this new retelling should, in theory, give Cathy more space than ever before—and actually flesh out her backstory and motivations in a way that the book never truly manages to.
As we’ve come to expect from the streaming giant, the supporting cast is stellar—Poor Things’s Christopher Abbott as Adam, Challengers’s Mike Faist as Charles, Hoon Lee as Lee, the Trask family’s Chinese-American servant, alongside Pugh’s Cathy—as is the behind-the-scenes team. Zoe Kazan—the actor best known for her work in The Big Sick, The Plot Against America, and She Said, who penned the Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal-led Wildlife with her partner, Paul Dano, and who also happens to be Elia Kazan’s granddaughter—is spearheading the adaptation and will serve as showrunner alongside Jeb Stuart. Meanwhile, Lion’s Garth Davis and Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre will split directing duties, and Pugh has signed on as an executive producer.
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