Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones Cast as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in Sebastián Lelio’s ‘Voyagers’
Sebastián Lelio, the auteur director behind A Fantastic Woman and last year’s The Wonder, is assembling his next project, Voyagers, with Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones set to play Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
The project comes hot out of the Cannes market, according to Variety, and is being set up at FilmNation Entertainment, with Ben Browning, Lynda Obst, and Druyan herself producing. Sagan is, of course, the famous scientist, author, and professor who is behind the novel Contact that inspired the 1997 sci-fi film; Druyan is the documentary filmmaker and producer who married Sagan in 1981 until he died in 1996. The two also wrote together the series Cosmos, a highly-influential docuseries that aired on PBS focused on a wide range of scientific topics.
The story will be set in 1977, when NASA launched the first interstellar probe, Voyager, and Sagan, along with a team of people he was leading, was tasked with creating a message to go with it, known as the Golden Record; that will be the backdrop against which the relationship between Sagan and Druyan, the focus point of the film, is set.
Lelio and Jessica Goldberg wrote the script based on Druyan and other members of the Golden Record program. Voyager will mark the second collaboration between Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones, after they shared the screen on FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which was released a year ago. Garfield said he would be taking a break from acting, but one year later, he’s currently in production on John Crowley’s We Live in Time along with Florence Pugh and has joined yet another film. Edgar-Jones, after the successful Normal People with Paul Mescal, is currently shooting Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters sequel, as well as the Carole King musical biopic Beautiful.
Lelio said in a statement about the new film:
“As a nine-year-old boy growing up during Chile’s dictatorship, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s TV series ‘Cosmos’ had a profound impact on me, igniting my fascination with life’s biggest questions and mysteries. It is a dream to make a movie about the Golden Record and, within it, the inspiring love story between Carl and Ann. I’m thrilled that Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones will be at the center of this epic romance set against the infinite backdrop of space and time.”
Druyan added:
“Imagine falling madly, truly in love with one of the greatest humans who ever lived, while creating a complex message about what it is to be alive, a golden record affixed to the first interstellar spacecraft launched by our species, bound to sail the Milky Way galaxy long after Earth ceases to exist. It takes a movie to bring that mythic experience, that cosmic love story to vivid life. After years of searching, I feel that we have found exactly the right colleagues and artists to capture the magic of it.”
No release date has been set for Voyagers.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
