James Norton will take to the high seas and star in Wavewalker: Breaking Free, he revealed today at Series Mania. His production company Rabbit Track Pictures will produce the TV adaptation of the Suzanne Heywood bestseller and prolific scribe Jack Thorne is writing the series. Deadline had the scoop on Rabbit Track optioning the book […]James Norton will take to the high seas and star in Wavewalker: Breaking Free, he revealed today at Series Mania. His production company Rabbit Track Pictures will produce the TV adaptation of the Suzanne Heywood bestseller and prolific scribe Jack Thorne is writing the series. Deadline had the scoop on Rabbit Track optioning the book
James Norton will take to the high seas and star in Wavewalker: Breaking Free, he revealed today at Series Mania.
His production company Rabbit Track Pictures will produce the TV adaptation of the Suzanne Heywood bestseller and prolific scribe Jack Thorne is writing the series.
Deadline had the scoop on Rabbit Track optioning the book and Norton revealed his plans to star in the series today during a Series Mania masterclass with Rabbit Track, the Banijay-backed label that Norton runs alongside Kitty Kaletsky.
Heywood’s memoir turns on the story of how her parents took her, aged seven, on a trip sailing around the world. It became a grueling decade-long journey during which she was desperate to return home.
Norton will play Heywood’s father. He had initially not planned to act in the project, but said as “a bit of boat man” who loves sailing, “It was an amazing role.”
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“What starts as a dream as this roguish father paints this beautiful picture about this trip that is meant to take a year or two, takes about 15,” added Norton. “The two children were basically enslaved by their father as crew members on this boat. He denied them a youth and an education.
“It’s about the against the odds fight for life and education, and the struggle between this very charismatic father, who loves his daugthers very dearly, and the cruelty that he puts on them.
Kaletsky added: “In the 1970s, her father sat her, her brother and her mother down said, ‘Sold the house, guys. I’ve bought a boat and we’re going to sail around the world following Captain Cook’s journey tomorrow.’
“The father is on the one hand an incredibly inspiring, charismatic, imaginative and wonderful person – the father everyone dreams of having if they want a swallows and amazons lifestyle – but he is actually as well a deeply narcissistic and navel-gazing toxic person.”
Norton added that being a four-part series like Thorne’s Adolescence made it “very exciting,” while Kaletsky noted the writer, who Norton worked with on the film Joy, had penned “the most fabulous pilot.”
In other news, the Rabbit Trackers divulged another new project in the works during the session, which was hosted by Deadline.
Kaletsky said the producer is close to closing an option deal for Swedish drama The End of Summer. The book was penned by crime writer Anders de la Motte and has already been adapted as a Swedish series, which ran in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.
The story takes in a flawed psychologist, a missing family member and layers of intrigue therein.
“It’s an incredibly moving and arresting story about a grievance counsellor, who becomes convinced her long lost brother has shown up in one of her sessions,” said Kaletsky, who added, “It’s very good.”
More follows.