Sky has found its new Blomkvist and Salander. David Oyelowo (Silo) and Viola Prettejohn (The Crown) will headline the broadcaster’s upcoming television take on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, stepping into roles previously made famous by Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace in the Swedish films, and later by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in David Fincher’s 2011 Hollywood version.
The eight-part series comes from Left Bank Pictures, the studio behind The Crown and Dept Q, with Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) directing and executive producing. Filming kicks off in Lithuania next month.
The story picks up the familiar setup: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is pulled into a decades-old mystery when industrialist Henrik Vanger hires him to find out what happened to his niece Harriet, who vanished more than thirty years earlier from the family’s isolated island estate. Blomkvist eventually teams up with Lisbeth Salander, a hacker with a sharp mind and a rough edge, and together they start pulling apart a family history full of buried secrets. Unlike earlier adaptations, this version is expected to spend more time with the extended Vanger family, giving the story room to breathe that the films didn’t have.
Amanda Coe, Steve Lightfoot, and Angela LaManna are writing and executive producing, with Andrea Harkin and Amy Neil also directing episodes. Oyelowo himself is an executive producer alongside Left Bank’s Charlotte Moore and John Phillips, Sky’s Sam Hoyle, and film producers Scott Rudin and Amy Pascal, who worked on the Fincher movie. Nuala O’Leary is series producer.
Sky’s Meghan Lyvers called the two leads “two of modern fiction’s most iconic and compelling characters.” Moore echoed that sentiment, noting the story’s themes of power and corruption feel especially relevant right now.
The project has had a bumpy road to get here. After Sky’s initial greenlight earlier this year, a rights dispute reportedly broke out between Sony and Banijay, the company behind the original Swedish films, over whether the TV and film rights had reverted back to Banijay following The Girl in the Spider’s Web. That dispute appears to have been settled, with the series now being made in partnership with Banijay’s Jarowskij/Yellow Bird banner.
Salander and Blomkvist have bounced around a few different screen versions over the years. Claire Foy played Salander in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, and Prime Video reportedly had its own TV adaptation in development at one point that never got off the ground. On the book side, Larsson only finished three novels before his death, but the series has continued well past the original trilogy, with David Lagercrantz picking up the story for three more books and Karin Smirnoff currently working through another set.
The new series will air on Sky in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, with Sony Pictures Television handling sales abroad and shopping the show to international buyers at Mipcom next month.