Kate Beckinsale is coming to the small screen for her first series regular gig ever. The “Underworld” actress has signed on to star in “The Widow,” an eight-episode thriller for Amazon Studios from ITV, The Hollywood Reporter confirms.
Scheduled to kick off production later this month in South Africa, Wales, and the Netherlands, the project sees Beckinsale playing Georgia Wells, a woman who has left her former life behind and “is no longer the woman she once was,” THR writes. “After seeing her ‘late’ husband on the news, Georgia is pulled back to face the world and will stop at nothing until she gets the truth about her past.” Her journey takes her all the way into “the depths of the African Congo where danger and revelation will greet her at every turn.”
Beckinsale earned raves for her role as a widow in 2016’s “Love & Friendship.” That comedy tells a decidedly different story — Beckinsale’s character is savvy, manipulative, and determined to secure a wealthy husband for herself and her daughter.
Produced by Eliza Mellor (“Poldark”), “The Widow” is written and exec produced by Harry and Jack Williams (“The Missing,” “Fleabag”) with Sam Donovan (“Humans”) and Olly Blackburn (“Donkey Punch”) directing.
The series will debut on ITV in the UK and on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.
“Kate Beckinsale is a brilliantly talented actress and we’re thrilled she’s joining us on this journey — we couldn’t imagine anyone more perfect for the role,” the Williams brothers said in a joint statement announcing the news Wednesday. “‘The Widow’ is our most ambitious and cinematic piece to date and we can’t wait to bring the dark heart of the Congolese jungle to the screen.”
“Women have a much harder deal [than men]. I say that as a woman but also as a mother,” Beckinsale has said. “We might not have corsets any more but we have just as much body oppression — you have to become the corset now, when you’re naked. There’s the same amount of mental energy going into trying to make your body do something it doesn’t naturally want to do; it’s an excellent way of controlling women. Whenever there are strides made in terms of women getting a vote or the pay gap closing or abortion laws improving, it seems strange that culturally it becomes the vogue to have people emaciatedly underweight or have boobs bigger than their head. It distracts everybody and slows the fight,” she observed.
The “Aviator” actress has also spoken out about the pay gap in Hollywood. “There is definitely pay inequality, for sure,” she acknowledged. “[W]hen a woman is earning a good deal of money…if she’s earning the most on the set, that can create its own problems. I think that there is still a kind of psychological block that probably needs still a few years to be ironed out about certain people’s resistance to that.”
