Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is getting a film adaptation starring Richard Gere, Deadline reports.
Halliday’s novel, published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster, is composed of two novellas. The first tells the story of Alice, a young editor, and her relationship with an older author, Ezra, during the Iraq War; the second follows Amar, an Iraqi American man who is detained at London’s Heathrow airport while trying to visit his brother in Kurdistan. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “A singularly conceived graft of one narrative upon another; what grows out of these conjoined stories is a beautiful reflection of life and art.”
The film adaptation will star Gere, known for his roles in An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman, and Chicago, as Ezra, and Diana Silvers (Booksmart, Billy Knight) as Alice. The movie will be written by Halliday, Edward Zwick, and Marshall Herskovitz; Zwick and Herskovitz previously collaborated on films including The Last Samurai and Love & Other Drugs. Zwick will direct.
Halliday told Deadline, “It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with Ed and Marshall on transposing Alice and Ezra’s story for the screen. I am enormously grateful to them for their humor, ingenuity, courage, compassion, and dedication.”
And Zwick said, “Like so many others I was charmed by Lisa’s book, not just because it’s emotional, insightful, and very funny, but because it’s about two people who discover that what the world calls asymmetry can in fact have another name: love.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
