Last year, Adele finished her latest Las Vegas residency and said that she was ready to take an “incredibly long” break as soon as those shows were done. This was expected. By any measure. Adele is one of the most popular singers on this planet we call Earth, but she does not play the pop-star game. Between album cycles, she disappears for years on end. The last time she was in the news, it was because Taylor Swift broke her first-week sales record, and I bet Adele didn’t care about that at all. So it’s a little surprising to learn that Adele is already coming back to the spotlight and that she’s doing it in a different way: She’s acting now.
Adele already has an Oscar for her James Bond theme “Skyfall,” but she has never acted in a motion picture before. We already have years of music-video evidence that Adele is great at looking pensive and regretful on camera, and I’m just seeing now that she played a fictionalized version of herself on a 2009 episode of Ugly Betty. Must’ve missed that one. Now, Variety reports that Adele will make her silver screen debut in Cry To Heaven, a new period drama from the director and fashion designer Tom Ford.
Tom Ford was super-famous as a fashion designer, the type who gets namechecked by lots of rappers, before he made the transition into directing with 2009’s A Single Man. He also made 2016’s Nocturnal Animals, and I hated that movie, but it got award nominations and shit. Making motion pictures isn’t just a vanity project for him, OK? He’s serious about it.
Ford will direct, write, and produce an adaptation of Cry To Heaven, a historical novel that Anne Rice published in 1982. In addition to Adele, the cast includes big-name actors like Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ciarán Hinds, George MacKay, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Paul Bettany, Hunter Schaefer, and Thandiwe Newton. Here’s how Variety describes the picture: “The fictional story follows two men, a Venetian noble and a castrated opera singer, whose lives become unexpectedly intertwined.” As far as I can tell, vampires are not involved.
Cry To Heaven is in pre-production right now, and it’ll start shooting in London and Rome in January. I bet the costumes will be spectacular.
