EXCLUSIVE: The Color Purple and In the Heights star Corey Hawkins has landed the lead role in Andscape‘s The Man in My Basement from director Nadia Latif, who is making their feature directorial debut.
Andscape is the Black-led content studio from Disney and ESPN. They’ll be financing the feature, which will be released on Hulu through Andscape’s existing partnership with the streamer.
The feature is an adaptation of the Walter Mosley novel. Hawkins will serve as executive producer and star opposite four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe.
In the African American neighborhood of Sag Harbor, Charles Blakey (Hawkins) is out of work, out of luck and on the verge of foreclosure on his ancestral home. A knock on the door from a mysterious businessman, Anniston Bennet (Dafoe), brings a bizarre and lucrative proposition; rent his dusty stand-up basement out for the summer and receive enough money to clear his debts for good. Once Charles accepts, he finds himself led down a terrifying path that confronts his family’s ghosts and locks the men in a terrifying puzzle, at the heart of it race, the source of their traumas and the root of all evil.
The production is a collaborative creative effort with B.O.B. FilmHouse, Protagonist Pictures and Good Gate Media.
Hawkins is currently in the SAG Award-nominated The Color Purple and won raves last year on Broadway for Top Dog/Underdog, where he was nominated for his second Tony after Six Degrees of Separation. His other feature credits include BlacKkKlansman, Straight Outta Compton, Kong: Skull Island and The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Hawkins is repped by CAA and Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein.