The very welcome trend for A-list celebrities to get on a West End stage and test their Shakespeare chops continues with some exciting announcements!
https://deadline.com/2024/07/sigourney-weaver-west-end-tempest-1236026153
First, we have Tom Hiddleston and Haley Atwell taking on Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. “You had me at Tom Hiddleston,” as the saying goes. If that’s not a saying, it should be. I don’t know if Haley Atwell (perhaps most well-known as Peggy Carter in many of the Captain America movies) has much Shakespeare to her credit already, though I do see a short Cymbeline in her IMDB history (as Innogen).
But what really caught my eye was Sigourney Weaver as Prospero?! Nice. The last time I saw a female Prospero was Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor’s movie adaptation. I assume they’ll do a similar thing where they gender-swap the role and make “Prospera” the mother figure, which, for my money, drastically changes the family dynamic of the play. But maybe that’s just because I’m a father.
I’m excited about the potential here because I never thought of Weaver as a Shakespearean. But apparently she’s got some credits to her name. She played Goneril in a 1979 King Lear while in college, and then Portia in a 1986 off-Broadway Merchant of Venice. What I found really neat, though, is her quote about bringing some Shakespeare to her break-out movie role in Alien:
The star once revealed that she pretended “I was doing Henry V the entire time” she was playing Ripley in Alien. “I thought, ‘Well, as a woman, I’ll never be cast as Henry V, so this is my Henry V,” Weaver told New York magazine in a 2012 interview.
I’m fascinated because that movie came out in 1979. When presumably she was either just out of college, or even still in. Shakespeare must have been completely new to her. But she still saw it as the source to build her character.
I hope she crushes it as Prospero. I also hope that the trend of taping these silly things continues. It’s not like all of us can just zip on over to the West End and get a ticket, especially when big celebrity names are the draw.