Two years after Carey Mulligan played a burgeoning feminist activist in Sarah Gavron’s women’s rights drama “Suffragette” comes word that she’ll portray one of the most famous feminists of all time. Variety reports that the Oscar-nominated actress will play Gloria Steinem in “An Uncivil War,” a drama that re-teams her with “Mudbound” helmer Dee Rees. Julianne Moore is also portraying Steinem in an upcoming pic, Julie Taymor’s “My Life on the Road.” That’s right — we have two women-directed Steinem-inspired films to look forward to.
Slated for production in March 2018, “An Uncivil War” focuses on “efforts by feminist activist and journalist Steinem, lawyer and activist Florynce Kennedy, and others to ratify the ERA, while conservative organizer Phyllis Schlafly advocates against it,” the source details. “The ERA was written to guarantee equal rights for all citizens regardless of sex, and although it passed both houses of Congress in 1972 and was submitted to the state legislatures for ratification, it fell short of enactment after receiving 35 of the necessary 38 state ratifications.” Rees has adapted the script, originally penned by David Kukoff (“Campus Confidential”).
FilmNation Entertainment is fully financing “An Uncivil War” and producing along with Peter Heller (“Dreamland”).
Mulligan and Rees’ previous collaboration, “Mudbound,” hits theaters and Netflix November 17. Rees’ critically acclaimed follow-up to “Bessie” scored the biggest deal out of Sundance this January. The multi-perspective Southern epic follows two men as they return home from WWII: Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) and Jamie (Garrett Hedlund). The former is black and the latter is white, and while they bond over their shared experiences abroad, they are welcomed back to very different circumstances in the United States. Mulligan plays Jamie’s sister-in-law.
Rees is signed on to direct an adaptation of Joan Didion’s 1996 best-seller “The Last Thing He Wanted,” a political thriller about a Washington Post journalist who becomes involved in the world of arms dealing.
In 2010 Mulligan received an Oscar nomination for Lone Scherfig’s “An Education.” Her upcoming projects include “On the Other Side,” a drama about the experiences of real-life Vietnam war correspondent Kate Webb, and “Collateral,” a BBC miniseries helmed by S.J. Clarkson (“Jessica Jones”) that’s being described as “a modern-day state of the nation project.”
“The hunger for female-driven stories is there,” Mulligan has told us. “You just have to make the films. This shock over how these films do so well is a bit tired now. Jennifer Lawrence can open movies like any male star.”
