Cate Blanchett To Star In Richard Linklater’s ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’

Cate Blanchett Richard Linklater ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’So, what’s the latest with Richard Linklater? Well, he has his long-awaited spiritual sequel to “Dazed And Confused,” now titled, “Everybody Wants Some,” arriving in next spring, but the fast moving director hit a snag with a recent project. “The Rosie Project,” slated to star Jennifer Lawrence, fell apart at Sony with THR revealing that negotiations between the actress (who was willing to cut her fee) and the notoriously tight-fisted studio honcho Tom Rothman dragged on and she eventually got fed up and exited the movie. Linklater soon followed.

READ MORE: The Films Of Richard Linklater Ranked Worst To Best

So a Linklater/Lawrence collaboration won’t be happening soon (though maybe one day?), but good news for the director, as he’s pivoted back toward "Where’d You Go, Bernadette" which he signed up for earlier this year, and bagged an Oscar winning actress for the lead. Cate Blanchett will star in the adaptation of Maria Semple‘s novel about an agoraphobic architect who goes missing, with the narrative told via emails, letters, FBI documents, correspondence, and more. Here’s the book synopsis: 

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber ("The Fault In Our Stars") wrote the script, and it’s probably a safe bet we’ll see this one rolling very soon.