AHOY

Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh Board Stone Mattress, a Lynne Ramsay Film Set on a Cruise Ship


Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh
Photos by Slaven Vlasic/WireImage and Noam Galai via Getty Images

Sandra Oh fans had been waiting to see what the actor would do next now that Killing Eve is a wrap, and the answer is even better than they’d dreamed. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Oh is set to star opposite Julianne Moore in Stone Mattress, acclaimed Lynne Ramsay’s upcoming adaptation of a Margaret Atwood story of the same title. It’s quite the team, and it gets even better: The film will take place on a luxurious cruise ship full of privileged influencers and rich retirees.

The first line of Atwood’s story, which you can read on the New Yorker’s website, will give you a good idea of what happens on board: “At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.” Verna would be Moore’s character, a retired physiotherapist who has twice been widowed. As the ships navigates the melting ice caps of the Arctic Northwest Passage, she meets Bob, a seemingly normal dude in his sixties who tries to seduce her. With horror, Verna realizes that this is actually her second time meeting him: He’s the same Bob who raped her when she was in her teens. Let’s just say she exacts her revenge with style—and we’re hoping she does so with Oh’s character, a passenger named Grace who Verna befriends. It’s dark, but rest assured that Verna has a sense of humor, which will no doubt come in handy when they mingle with the influencers on board.

Ramsay, whose past films include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Morvern Cellar, couldn’t sound more eager to adapt Stone Mattress. “I was immediately gripped by the way [the story] framed the deeply buried trauma of a post-menopausal woman—an age group we hear from all too rarely—through the dynamic and multifaceted character of Verna,” she said. “From its tongue-in-cheek humor to its moments of icy vengeance and delicate portrayal of an emotional repression specific to the boomer generation, it is a story I’ve wanted to materialize on-screen since my first reading.” She’ll start off doing so in September, when filming begins in Iceland and Greenland. As of now, there’s no word on when the film will be released.