In December, the streamer announced that newcomer Aria Mia Loberti will play the central role of Marie-Laure, in the screen version of Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer-winning 2014 novel. Marie-Laure is a blind teenage girl fighting for survival in occupied France during World War II, who fatefully crosses paths with a young German soldier, Werner. Show Scribner All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Scribner All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Per Netflix's release, Loberti is a recent Fulbright Scholar and a current PhD student at Pennsylvania State University. Though she has no formal acting training and has not acted on screen before, Loberti decided to audition after hearing that the casting directors were seeking blind and low-vision actresses for the role. “To find an actress to play the iconic Marie-Laure—a young blind woman whose greatest strength is the tenacity of her hope and the power of her voice across the airwaves during wartime—was no small challenge," director and executive producer Shawn Levy said in a statement. "We searched the world and reviewed thousands of auditions. We never thought our path would lead to someone who has not only never acted professionally, but never auditioned before. It was a jaw-drop moment when we first saw Aria Mia Loberti, who is both a natural performer and an advocate for disability equity and representation. I can’t wait to tell this beautiful story with her at the center.” All The Light We Cannot See has been adapted into a four-part Netflix limited series, directed by Levy and written by Steven Knight, whose credits include Peaky Blinders and Spencer. In January, it was confirmed that Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie are also joining the cast. Ruffalo will play Daniel LeBlanc, " the principal locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris," and Marie-Laure's father. Laurie will play Etienne LeBlanc, which Netflix describes as "an eccentric and reclusive World War I hero suffering from PTSD." More cast members were announced in February, including the key role of Werner. He'll be played by Dark actor Louis Hofmann, and is described as "quietly pensive, handsome young German soldier who gets swept up in the brutality of war. Soulful, poetic and honorable with leading man looks, he has a strong moral compass in a complicated world." Lars Eidinger will play Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel, who's described by Netflix's casting release as "a cruel, terminally ill Nazi officer who spends his final days ruthlessly hunting down a prized, legendary diamond believed to give its owner eternal life." Nell Sutton will make her acting debut as the younger version of Marie-Laure, described as "thoughtful, curious, intelligent and courageous." Like Loberti, Sutton is legally blind. Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything. The Day of the Triffids is a 1951 science fiction novel by John Wyndham, arguably the most famous of the British author's so-called "cosy catastrophes". The book's narrator is an Englishman named Bill Masen, who details how some years previously the eponymous carnivorous plants mysteriously began to appear all over the world, eventually proving to be capable of movement and possessing the ability to attack humans with their poisonous stings; Masen's own theory is that they were deliberately bioengineered in the Soviet Union and then accidentally released into the wild, but the truth is never revealed. Whatever their origin, the plants are also discovered to produce a high-quality vegetable oil, and so an entire industry grows up around farming them. Masen works as a researcher on a Triffid farm, and ends up in the hospital after a Triffid stings him on the face. His eyes thus bandaged, he misses a bizarre meteor shower that lights up the night skies all over the world. Advertisement: Come morning, Masen learns that the shower has struck blind everyone who viewed it. (He later speculates that the shower was actually a malfunctioning orbital weapons system, but again no proof is to be found one way or the other.) Wandering through a disintegrating London, he meets and quickly falls in love with a sighted novelist named Josella Playton (who missed seeing the "meteor shower" because she was sleeping off an unfortunate party experience.) While the Triffids rapidly break free of their farms and begin wiping out the blinded population, Masen and Playton become entangled in the squabbles of other sighted survivors leading to their unwilling separation. They are finally reunited at a small estate in the English countryside, taking up farming in a fenced enclave surrounded by hordes of Triffids. When a despotic new government appears on the scene, they join a colony of more freedom-minded individuals on the Isle of Wight, researching for the day they can defeat the Triffids and reclaim the Earth for humanity. Advertisement: In 2001, the author Simon Clark wrote a sequel to the book entitled The Night of the Triffids, which attempted to be a pastiche of Wyndham's style, and details the adventures of Bill and Josella's son. The novel has been adapted for film three times, first by a very loosely-adapted 1962 feature film; then by a 1981 BBC miniseries which, while low-budget, is quite faithful to the original work; and once more by the BBC in 2009, again with the plot deviating a great deal from the original. The novel contains examples of:
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