Millie Bobby Brown has found her director. Tom Hooper, the Oscar winner behind “The King’s Speech,” is set to helm Netflix’s film adaptation of “Nineteen Steps,” the World War II novel Brown co-wrote with British author Kathleen McGurl. The news first broke through Deadline and was reported by The Wrap on April 20.
Brown will star in and produce the film through her PCMA banner alongside her husband Jake Bongiovi and her father Bobby Brown. Jonathan Eirich is producing for Rideback, with Nick Reynolds on board as executive producer. Anthony McCarten, the four-time Oscar nominee who wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “The Theory of Everything,” is adapting the screenplay. The project remains in development.
The book came out through William Morrow in September 2023 and landed on both the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. It’s a family story for Brown. The novel draws on the wartime experiences of her own grandmother and follows Nellie Morris, an 18-year-old in East London’s Bethnal Green neighborhood, whose life is upended by air raids, rationing, and a romance with an American airman named Ray.
At the center of the story sits a real event. On March 3, 1943, 173 people were crushed to death on a narrow staircase leading into the Bethnal Green Tube station as they rushed for cover during an air raid alarm. It remains one of the deadliest civilian disasters on British soil during the war. The “nineteen steps” of the title refer to that very staircase.
Hooper hasn’t made a feature since 2019. That was “Cats,” a critical and commercial wipeout that became one of the more conspicuous big-swing misfires of the last decade. Before it, though, his résumé was studded with prestige hits. “The King’s Speech” took Best Picture and Best Director in 2011. “Les Misérables” and “The Danish Girl” both pulled down Oscars of their own. His television work, including HBO’s “John Adams” and “Elizabeth I,” plus episodes of “His Dark Materials,” runs deep in period drama. A wartime London love story is squarely in his wheelhouse.
He’s also been circling “Photograph 51,” an adaptation of Anna Ziegler’s play with Natalie Portman attached to play DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin. That project was announced during last year’s Cannes Market.
For Brown, “Nineteen Steps” is the latest in a long run of Netflix collaborations. She grew up on the streamer’s “Stranger Things,” which has now wrapped its fifth and final season. “Enola Holmes 3” arrives this summer. She also has the romantic comedy “Just Picture It,” co-starring Gabriel LaBelle and directed by Lee Toland Krieger, on the way.
The new deal lands days after a less welcome headline for Brown. Earlier this month she walked away from “Perfect,” Netflix’s planned biopic of Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, citing creative differences with the producers. The streamer then shelved the film entirely. Replacing that gap with a Hooper project is, by any reasonable read, a sharp pivot.
Netflix has not set a release date for “Nineteen Steps.”
