Questions continue to loom over Daniel Craig’s future on the silver screen as 007, though the actor is reportedly eyeing up a role that is worlds away from the rat-a-tat action of British espionage.
According to Variety, Craig has closed a deal to headline Purity, a new 20-episode drama series that is currently doing the rounds at the biggest networks in the country. Showtime and Netflix are among the early bidders to snatch rights for the limited series, itself an adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel of the same name which hit store shelves last September.
Currently, Scott Rudin and Todd Field (In The Bedroom, Little Children) are attached to produce and direct, respectively, with the latter working on a script in tandem with Franzen.
Beyond Daniel Craig, it’s too early yet for the production to nail down its cast, though we understand the core story centers on Purity (AKA Pip), an aimless young Californian who falls in line with an activist group after leaving college. From Oakland to Bolivia to Denver, her character sleepwalks through a globe-trotting journey, meeting all kinds of colorful characters along the way.
Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother–her only family–is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world–including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is by no means the author’s first foray with the small screen, after his The Corrections set up shop at HBO. Alas, production ground to a halt before it could get going in earnest, and Franzen, Field and now Craig will be hoping for better fortunes with Purity.