Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the scripts behind awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Juror #2, the courtroom thriller starring Nicholas Hoult and the 42nd film directed by Clint Eastwood. Jonathan Abrams, who wrote the book for the Broadway Huey Lewis jukebox musical The Heart of Rock and Roll, penned the script in his feature writing debut.
Warner Bros released the pic in theaters November 1 after its world premiere as the closing-night film at AFI Fest. It debuted on Max on Friday and has a 93% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The plot centers on family man Justin Kemp (Hoult) who, while serving as a juror in a high-profile Georgia murder trial and quickly realizes he might be closer to the victim than originally realized. To speak up and cover for a falsely accused man will risk it all for him. Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Amy Aquino and Adrienne C. Moore also star.
Abrams says Eastwood’s 1992 Western Unforgiven, which earned the helmer Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, is one of his favorite films, and that another pic for which Eastwood scored a Best Director nom, 2003’s Mystic River, “is a major touchpoint and inspiration for the Juror #2 screenplay in the way it uses a thriller structure to explore characters, relationships and the difficult moral choices we must make.” Eastwood’s notes on the original script leaned into that aspect.
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The scribe, making his feature screenwriting debut after producing 2013’s Stallone-Schwarzenegger prison thriller Escape Plan, says he came up with the idea for Juror #2 after doing some work as a consultant to a prosecutor friend adding a Hollywood touch to his opening and closing arguments.
“One day, I was in court watching voir dire (jury selection) and not unlike the scene in the movie, every potential juror was trying to be excused and the judge wasn’t having it. I asked myself, ‘What could someone say that would get them excused?’ and jokingly thought that identifying oneself as the perpetrator of the crime would surely qualify as a conflict of interest. That was the spark, ‘What if you were called for jury duty for a murder you committed?’ and from there I explored every possible iteration of that premise before settling on the story of a relatable everyman who just wants to do the right thing… but at what cost to himself and his family?”
Check out his script below.
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