The story of Pepa, that dubbing actress deliciously played by Carmen Maura who, after breaking up with her partner and fed up with the memories contained in the walls of her apartment, decides to rent the house, giving way to a handful of the most extravagant people, will be converted to a string. Apple is preparing a television fiction inspired by ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (1988), the feature film that paved the way for Pedro Almodóvar’s success.
The news was published yesterday by ‘The Hollywood Reporter’, which also indicates that the filmmaker from La Mancha will be in the project as executive producer, through El Deseo. Tim Cook’s company, also responsible for the video-on-demand service Apple TV+, has bought the rights to Almodóvar’s work and the project is so advanced that it is already known who will play Pepa on this occasion. Gina Rodriguez, winner of the Golden Globe for ‘Jane the Virgin’, will be responsible for succeeding Carmen Maura in a role as crazy as it is complex. The interpreter will also serve as executive producer, while Noelle Valdivia, screenwriter and producer of series such as ‘Ash vs. Evil Dead’, or ‘Mozart in the Jungle’, will act as ‘showrunner’ in this project in charge of Lionsgate Television.
The adaptation of ‘Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown’ will also not lose its Latin origin because the series is expected to alternate dialogues in Spanish and English, as will also happen with ‘Now and Then’, the thriller that Bambú Producciones is preparing for Apple TV +.
It should be remembered that this is not the first time that Almodóvar’s feature film is about to become a television series beyond our borders. In 2009, Fox TV Studios launched an adaptation that would also have Almodóvar’s blessing., although it was going to move away from the plot of the film and be written entirely in English. Ultimately, it couldn’t be.
Interestingly, the director is now preparing to shoot his first film in English, ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’, in which he adapts some of Lucia Berlin’s stories collected in an anthology focused on the suffering of several women throughout throughout the world. The project, long cherished by the director, will finally see the light of day thanks to the help of Cate Blanchett, who, through her Dirty Films label, obtained the rights to the work in which she herself is going to star. The film will try to combine the stories of the book in a single plot between the US and Spain, alternating between English and Spanish.
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