EXCLUSIVE: Nearly 20 years after the Nicolas Roeg movie starring Kelly Reilly and Donald Sutherland, a small screen version of Fay Weldon’s supernatural novel Puffball is in development.
Deadline understands Firebird Pictures has optioned the 1980 novel, with Morgan Lloyd Malcom, an Olivier Award-winning playwright who penned Netflix thriller Obsession, attached to write.
Fay Weldon’s Puffball follows a young London couple, Liffey and Richard, who move to the country with the expectation of having children. Their neighbours are Mabs and Tucker, a farming family with five children of their own. Mabs, jealous of the newcomers’ easy life, sends Tucker to sleep with Liffey while Richard is away, priming her with an herbal aphrodisiac, but she becomes angry when Liffey becomes pregnant and finds that she herself is suddenly unable to conceive.
The novel was made into a 2007 film directed by Roeg starring Yellowstone’s Reilly as Liffey, Sutherland as Lars and Miranda Richardson as Mabs.
Weldon is a celebrated British writer whose past work includes The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which was made into an American movie starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr, and a BBC series. She died in 2023 after publishing more than 30 novels.
Firebird’s TV version of Puffball is not yet attached to a network and hasn’t cast but Lloyd Malcolm is a good get as writer. She won an Olivier Award for her play Emilia, which is now being made into a film, and also wrote Netflix thriller Obsession starring Richard Armitage, along with well-reviewed psychological movie The Wasp starring Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer. Obsession was also based on older IP, the 1991 novel by Josephine Hart.
BBC Studios-backed Firebird is producing Puffball. The indie has recently come off the back of Nicôle Lecky’s Wild Cherry for the BBC and is making Wahala for the same network. That one just cast Cush Jumbo, Adelayo Adedayo, Deborah Ayorinde and Susan Wokoma.
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