Earlier this year, the cast of Hulu’s upcoming adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations With Friends, was finally announced, featuring former Dazed cover star Sasha Lane, Girls’ Jemima Kirke, newcomer Alison Oliver, and Joe Alwyn.
Now, courtesy of Alwyn, we’ve received a first look at the actors on the set of the drama. In one of several behind-the-scenes photos posted to Instagram — captioned “cwf” — Alwyn poses with Oliver and Lane, who play the book’s narrator, Frances, and her best friend and ex-girlfriend, Bobbi. In another image, the actor shares a portrait of himself drawn by Jemima Kirke.
Kirke herself spoke about the process of working on Conversations With Friends last month, in an interview with WWD. The story, she says, is “sort of told in terms of the relationships between the characters and within the conversations”.
“It needs to be told with sort of nuance and subtlety, but with a lot of care within the dialogue,” she adds. “Everything has to have meaning and has to have relevance, even a moment of asking if someone’s (ok).”
“It’s those kinds of moments of mundaneness, or domesticity, or everyday actions that are really fun for an actor, or for me at least, to sort of find the point in it all, the story within it.”
Confirmed to be going ahead in 2020, following the wild success of the Normal People TV adaptation, Conversations With Friends tells the story of two Dublin students (Frances and Bobbi) who become romantically entangled with a married couple. Irish filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson returns to direct, alongside writer Alice Birch. Rooney herself is reportedly on board as an executive producer.
The show is set to premiere as 12 half-hour episodes on the BBC and Hulu next year, though a specific release date is yet to be announced.
This week, meanwhile, Sally Rooney announced that she rejected an Israel-based publishing house’s offer to buy the translation rights for her most recent novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, in solidarity with Palestine. Read more on that here, and take a look behind the scenes of the Conversations With Friends TV series below.
