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The Thursday Murder Club is coming to Netflix, and its impressive star-studded cast list keeps growing.
Luficfer's Tom Ellis has been cast in the crime-comedy movie based on Richard Osman's novel of the same name. Deadline reported that in addition to Ellis, Richard E. Grant, Geoff Bell, Paul Freeman, Sarah Niles, and Ingrid Oliver will also be in the film.
Additionally, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, and Henry Lloyd-Hughes are attached. They were all announced earlier.
About The Thursday Murder Club
The film follows a group of friends who, from a retirement home, solve murders strictly for the fun of it. However, things turn when they find themselves caught up in a real case.
The new film is written and directed by Chris Columbus, the filmmaker of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Jennifer Todd and Columbus are producers. Holly Bario, Jeb Brody, Eleanor Columbus, and Jo Burns are executive producers.
Osman is well-known in the UK. He presents the BBC game show Richard Osman's House of Games and was the quizmaster of the daytime quiz Pointless. With the 2020 publication of The Thursday Murder Club, he became a literary celebrity because it became a bestseller, selling millions of copies.
Richard Osman opens up about writing
In a 2022 interview with the Washington Post, the author shed some light on writing. He was asked about the development of his characters and whether they were based on people he knows in real life.
“I haven't really based them on people,” Osman said. “They're really the four corners of my own brain, I think, in that I find each of them very easy to access. I mean, the main narrator, Joyce, is a 78-year-old woman, and I find it worryingly easy to get inside her head! Whenever I'm stuck I'll write a Joyce chapter.”
“But I don't like characters who are purely archetypes,” he added. “I love it when someone comes in and you think, ‘Oh, they're going to be the baddie,' and they might be the baddie, but they're also something else. I like to think, ‘If an actor had this minor role would they be happy, even if they're only in two scenes?”
Why does he do what he does? It's all about entertainment.
“There are writers I love and admire who do a different job and make extraordinary art, who add to the Great canon of literature,” Osman said. “But hopefully, if I'm anything, I'm an entertainer. I write the books that I would read, and I write them as well as I can, but my main job is to try to entertain people, not to move the history of literature in a particular direction. I'm here to give people a book that they can't put down, and if they're on a plane journey then the plane journey goes quicker, and if they're on a holiday they remember the holiday because they read the book. That's sometimes looked down on a little bit, but it's really hard to do!”
Finally, he noted, “I'd love to be a Cormac McCarthy or an Alice Munro, but I'm not. I do have a place though, and that is: ‘Would you like to be royally entertained?' Some laughter, some tears, a mystery — I try to do that as well as I possibly can.”
Currently, there's no release date for The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix, but production has begun.
