Planned for Martin Scorsese to helm back in 2011, the big screen adaptation of Jo Nesbo‘s best-seller The Snowman found a new helmer last year in Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) and a new lead last month in Academy Award nominee Michael Fassbender (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Shame). Now, Deadline is reporting another momentum-builder for the film as red-hot actress Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) has entered talks to play the thriller’s female lead with an eye towards a January start date.
The seventh entry in Nesbo’s “Harry Hole” series, The Snowman is officially described as follows:
It is November in Oslo and the first snow of the year has fallen. Birte Becker comes home from work and praises the snowman her husband and son have made in the garden. But they haven’t made a snowman. As the family stand by the sitting room window looking out in amazement at the snowman, the son notices that it is facing the house. The black eyes are staring at the window. At them.
Detective Inspector Harry Hole receives an anonymous letter signed “The Snowman.” Later he finds an alarming common thread in all the old disappearance cases. Married women go missing the day the first snow falls. That same night Sylvia Pedersen is fighting her way through the first snow in a forest outside Oslo. She knows she is running for her life, but she doesn’t know what from. Nor does she know what lies ahead. Fortunately.
Alfredson himself wrote a draft of the screenplay alongside Soren Sveistrup, although Matthew Michael Carnahan (World War Z, State of Play) is credited with the shooting script. Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner are attached to produce The Snowman along with Robyn Slovo and Piodor Gustafsson, with Scorsese executive producing.
Ferguson will next be seen opposite Emily Blunt, Chris Evans and Jared Leto in DreamWorks’ hotly-anticipated The Girl on the Train adaptation, currently in pre-production. The trade also mentions that she is under early consideration for a plumb female role in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus sequel Alien: Paradise Lost, a script for which was just delivered to 20th Century Fox in recent weeks.
