To avoid any confusion, I will note upfront that this is not the movie called The Actor directed by Richard Blake that was released earlier this year and is currently available on streaming services (although that one looks like it might be fun).
Donald Westlake’s superb posthumous novel Memory is getting a movie adaptation. From Deadline:
André Holland (Passing) and Gemma Chan (Don’t Worry Darling) will top Neon‘s The Actor, the second feature (and first in live-action) from Oscar-nominated Anomalisa helmer Duke Johnson, which has wrapped production. Holland takes over the male lead from Ryan Gosling, who was forced to drop out due to scheduling conflicts but remains aboard the project as an executive producer.
The film scripted by Johnson and Stephen Cooney is based on the bestselling novel Memory by Donald E. Westlake and tells the story of actor Paul Cole (Holland), who finds himself stranded in 1950s Ohio, suffering from severe memory loss after a brutal attack, struggling to find his way back to his life in New York and reclaim what he has lost.
Additional cast set for the film includes Tracey Ullman (Curb Your Enthusiasm), Toby Jones (Empire of Light), Simon McBurney (Wolfwalkers) and Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders).
There is a tie-in edition from Hard Case Crime with a scheduled release date of November 19, 2024, but HCC notes that it will probably come out a few weeks later than that. I was unable to find a release date for the movie, but the timing of the tie-in edition would indicate first quarter 2025.
Nothing against André Holland as I’ve never seen one of his movies (not counting 42 where he is pretty far down the credits list), but it’s too bad Ryan Gosling couldn’t take the part as he seems born to it, plus The Actor might make a fine companion piece to his two-degrees-of-separation Drive (Drive almost certainly inspired by The Driver, which was in turn almost certainly inspired by the Parker novels).
I read Memory but did not review it. There is probably no single reason why I didn’t quite get to writing that piece, but I will say that at the time I read it, some of it hit really close to home. It was a crazy time in my life, and it’s a powerful book.
I can’t decide whether to reread and review it now, or wait so that the book won’t overly prejudice me toward the movie. I don’t know if it’s even possible to film a close adaptation of the book, so I’m not sure that it matters much either way—the movie is going to be a very different work.