Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club Film Has A Star Cast

4th June 2024 | By Rufus Punt

Calling all crime fiction fans! At long last, bestselling crime novel The Thursday Murder Club is finally getting adapted for the screen- with some big names attached.

Written by Pointless presenter Richard Osman, the whodunnit mystery will be turned into a feature length film, slated to be released by Netflix and is currently confirmed to be starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley. While there’s no release date yet, there’s still a few early details that have been revealed: here’s what to know.

What is The Thursday Murder Club about?

When it released in 2020, The Thursday Murder Club became a smash hit, becoming the first debut novel to be ranked No.1 in the book charts at Christmas, and propelling Osman from “the guy from Pointless” to one of the biggest current names in crime fiction. Part of that may have stemmed from everyone desperately wanting an escape in the pandemic, but a lot of it came from the novel’s page turning mystery and clever plotting. There’s a bit of Agatha Christie and Miss Marple about it: Thursday Murder Club follows a group of pensioners living in Kent, who come together to solve a puzzling murder that befalls their retirement village close to the (fictional) town of Fairhaven. The victim is a builder in charge of a new development that’s about to begin construction at Cooper’s Chase retirement village.

Who’s in the cast, and what else do we know?

So who’s been cast as who? The author himself has revealed that Dame Helen Mirren will be playing the role of Elizabeth Best, once a spy, while Pierce Brosnan, will play Ron Ritchie, a former union activist, and Sir Ben Kingsley will play Ibrahim Arif, an ex-psychiatrist. The character of Joyce Meadowcroft has still yet to be cast, but these four together make up the titular mystery-solving Thursday Murder Club. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment will be producing the film, and it’ll be directed by Harry Potter and Home Alone director Chris Colombus..

It’s yet to begin shooting though, with filming set to begin in June of this year, so we’ll have a while to wait yet until The Thursday Murder Club is on our screens. It seems likely that it’ll release sometime next year, and Netflix announced that the movie will be released by them, with a possible cinema release as well as streaming. The novel has also received three sequels, with a fourth being written, to tide you over.

Want more crime fiction? Check out new Netflix series Bodkin, HBO doc The Jinx Part Two, or an immersive Sherlock Holmes mystery at The Lost Estate.


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