Great Expectations adds some Death Eaters and a War Horse

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

If you’re going to adapt a great literary classic, and a Dickens novel nonetheless, you’re going to need to bringing in some dramatic heavy hitters.

So who better to join GREAT EXPECTATIONS than Voldemort and Bellatrix Lestrange themselves? Director Mike Newell is reuniting with his GOBLET OF FIRE actors Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter for the film, which is a dramatic departure from his last effort, PRINCE OF PERSIA.

Also onboard is young Jeremy Irvine to play the lead role of Pip, an actor hand picked by Steven Spielberg to star in his upcoming WAR HORSE. Fiennes is in talks to play Magwitch and Bonham-Carter will play Ms. Havisham.

In case you skipped this one in AP English, here are the Cliff Notes:

Reared in the marshes of Kent by his disagreeable sister and her sweet-natured husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, the young Pip one day helps a convict to escape. Later he is sent to live with Miss Havisham, a woman driven half-mad years earlier by her lover’s departure on their wedding day. Her other ward is the orphaned Estella, whom she is teaching to torment men with her beauty. Pip, at first cautious, later falls in love with Estella, to his misfortune. When an anonymous benefactor makes it possible for Pip to go to London for an education, he credits Miss Havisham. He begins to look down on his humble roots, but nonetheless Estella spurns him again and marries instead the ill-tempered Bentley Drummle. Pip’s benefactor turns out to have been Abel Magwitch, the convict he once aided, who dies awaiting trial after Pip is unable to help him a second time. Joe rescues Pip from despair and nurses him back to health.

Think with this cast Newell can deliver?