Sarah Jessica Parker and Catherine Zeta-Jones have signed on to starring roles in projects by European female filmmakers.
Parker will return to the rom-com genre in Ella Lemhagen’s All Roads Lead to Rome, in which she’ll play a type-A personality who heads into the Italian countryside with her ex-boyfriend Luca to search for her wayward teenage daughter.
Zeta-Jones will play slightly against type in Eva Sørhaug’s The Godmother, a biopic of crime queenpin Griselda Blanco. With her husband, Blanco trafficked cocaine with a vicious streak that led to her becoming the only prominent woman in the Columbian drug trade. If Internet comments are anything to go by, the casting of the Welsh-born Zeta-Jones is already creating grumbles about racial insensitivity.
It’s probably no coincidence that the Swedish Lemhagen and the Norwegian Sørhaug both hail from Scandinavia, which leads the world in gender equality, including in the film industry.
