There are meta moments in Hollywood, and then there’s a Star Wars actress’ spouse being cast in a film based on Reylo fanfiction! Here’s how it’s happening!
Fan-fiction, the writing of original stories using characters from popular films, books games and TV shows, has been around since before the Internet, and many fanfic writers have produced great work. Indeed, it often seems the fan-fiction writers are better than the professionals paid millions for screenplays.
Some tales are famous, such as how E.L. James wrote Twilight fan-fiction that she turned into the best-selling 50 Shades books, which became hit movies. Likewise, Cassandra Clare wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that turned into The Mortal Instruments, which inspired a failed movie and the successful Shadowhunters show.
One subset of Star Wars fan-fiction is “Reylo,” which involves stories of romance between sequel trilogy character Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). There are Reylo fanfics set in the regular Star Wars universe and others that transplant these characters to different times and places.
One of these fics was Head Over Feet, posted in 2018 to fan-fiction repository Archive Of Our Own by Ali Hazelwood (the fic itself is no longer available). It told a story set in our world and featured Rey and Kylo as college students.
A literary agent saw the story and was impressed by Hazelwood’s writing. She was convinced to rework the fic into The Love Hypothesis, basically keeping everything the same but removing the references to Star Wars, much like E.L. James reworked her Twilight fanfic into 50 Shades of Grey. Still, the main characters clearly resemble Kylo and Rey.
The book was a bestseller that launched Hazelwood as a top romance author. Now, her book is being adapted to film, with a unique Star Wars connection!
Who stars in The Love Hypothesis?
Per Deadline, The Love Hypothesis is an Amazon MGM film directed by Claire Scanlon, with Sarah Rothschild handling the screenplay and Hazelwood herself on board as a producer.
For those who haven’t read it, the book centers around Olive Smith, a med student who’s often judged on her lack of a love life. She pretends to be dating her handsome professor, Adam Carlsen, who goes along with it. Naturally, it’s not long before real feelings emerge.
For the movie version, Olive will be played by Lili Reinhart, best known for her role as Betty Cooper on the CW hit Riverdale. As for Adam, he’ll be played by Tom Bateman, the British actor known for roles in Murder On The Orient Express and Death on the Nile…and also Daisy Ridley’s real-life husband, with the pair having met on the Express set.
I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but the idea of Bateman in the “Kylo” role in this film is genius. One wonders if the studio had tried to get Ridley to play Olive to really make the connection believable, or if this is just a coincidence. It still has to rank as a wild turn for Bateman to play a role based on his wife’s fictional “frenemy/romance” partner.
The movie is in pre-production now and likely not coming until next year, but one has to wonder how Ridley will feel seeing her husband in a story she helped inspire.
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