Helena Bonham Carter is coming to the small-screen. The two-time Oscar nominee will star in the miniseries “Saint Maizie,” a portrait of a big-hearted New Yorker in the Jazz Age. Bonham Carter will also develop and produce the project alongside Faye Ward’s Fable Pictures and Scott LaStaiti’s Palantir Group. She and Ward will be reuniting: Ward was a producer on 2015’s “Suffragette,” a period drama about women’s voting rights in the UK that Bonham Carter starred in.
Variety reports that the miniseries is based on “Mazie Gordon-Phillips, the real-life character who Joseph Mitchell first wrote about in the New Yorker in 1940, and who [Jami] Attenberg brought to life in her book ‘Saint Mazie.’ Mazie spent her days selling tickets at a movie theater which she eventually inherited, and in her spare time she walked the streets of New York, giving the homeless soap and sips of liquor from her flask.”
No word on a director, or directors, just yet. Award-winning playwright Clara Brennan will adapt the script from Attenberg’s critically acclaimed 2015 novel. Feminist magazine Bust wrote that the author “excels at developing Mazie’s voice as she grows from an impetuous, witty girl, into a shrewd-yet-selfless character. But the book is largely about the silent tragedies of womanhood, and the different forms love and loneliness can take.”
Brennan commented, “I adored Jami’s wonderful book and the liveliness and vitality she conjured in her characters and city. Mazie is a very rare and rich character, she just had to be adapted for TV audiences.”
“Mazie is a restless, independent woman who embodies the essence of 1930s New York,” said Ward. “Our story unveils a woman in the middle of her life, a local legend who lifted the spirit of a community and yet barely moved beyond the perimeter of two square miles. She was in love with the streets and the people, she saw beauty in the dirt. It is exciting to think of Helena on screen oozing the spirit of this courageous woman. Clara’s witty and political voice is perfect for Mazie and her world.”
Bonham Carter is no stranger to literary adaptations. She’s brought characters from books to life in many films, including but not limited to “Cinderella,” “Harry Potter,” “Les Misérables,” “Great Expectations,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Wings of the Dove,” and “Howards End.” You can catch her in theaters now in a big-screen rendering of the classic children’s book “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
