“Bend it Like Beckham” director Gurinder Chadha has teamed up with Gillian Anderson and “Downton Abbey’s” Hugh Bonneville for “Viceroy’s House.” The film “depicts the final few months of British rule in India and its release will coincide with the 70th Anniversary of the Independence of India and the founding of Pakistan,” Screen Daily writes.
Bonneville plays Lord Mountbatten, with Anderson as his wife, Lady Mountbatten. Sir Michael Gambon, Simon Callow, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, and Om Puri round out the rest of the cast.
As Chadha wrote for a first-person piece in The Guardian, she was inspired to make the film after finding her ancestral home through the BBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”
“Although I had been a filmmaker for many years, I had never had the courage to tackle the political tragedy that tore my family apart,” she explained. “To reach a global audience, I knew that I had to make my film entertaining and accessible. What better way than to visually embrace the splendor of the Raj, of Viceroy’s House, and to use humor and passion to tell a tale of upstairs and downstairs life in the grand tradition of ‘Gosford Park’ and ‘Downton Abbey.’”
“Viceroy’s House” will open the UK on March 3, 2017. No word on a U.S. release yet.
