Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones in Talks to Reunite for “The Aeronauts” at Amazon

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Actor Eddie Redmayne has remained relatively quiet this year after starring in Warners’ Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them last year. While Redmayne has been filming the sequel to that movie to be released next November, he’s looking ahead for his next project. Variety reports that Redmayne is now in talks to star in Amazon Studios’ The Aeronauts. 

UPDATED: Since posting the original article, Deadline has added that Redmayne’s The Theory of Everything co-star Felicity Jones is in talks to join him for the project.

The film will be directed by Tom Harper (War and Peace) from a screenplay by Jack Thorne (Wonder) about balloon pilot Amelia Wren and scientist James Glaisher, who flew higher in an open balloon in 1862 then anyone before them (or since) in order to explore the earth’s atmosphere.

Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman of Mandeville Films are producing The Aeronatus, which Amazon picked up as a spec last year. Deadline says that they will start filming in London early next spring.

Repped by CAA, United Agents and Untitled Entertainment, Redmayne won an Oscar playing scientist Stephen Hawking in 2014’s The Theory of Everything and received a second nomination for 2015’s The Danish Girl, for which his co-star Alicia Vikander won an Oscar.

Felicity Jones was nominated for an Oscar for her role playing Hawking’s wife in Theory and she also has remained fairly quiet in 2017 after starring in 2016’s highest-grossing movie Rogue One.  She also starred with Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s Inferno, the drama A Monster Calls and the delayed action-thriller Collide in 2016. Jones recently played a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Mimi Leder’s On the Basis of Sex opposite Armie Hammer. She is repped by WME, Independent and Peikoff Mahan.

This sounds like another pairing for Redmayne and Jones, who presumably will be spending much of The Aeronauts in a hot air balloon together. Considering how much the pair was loved in The Theory of Everything, this is a smart decision to reunite them for another film.

Edward Douglas | East Coast Editor