{"id":787228,"date":"2026-09-30T08:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T08:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/787228\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T08:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T08:14:14","slug":"richard-linklater-is-pretty-confident-no-one-will-die-while-making-merrily-we-roll-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/787228\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Linklater is pretty confident no one will die while making Merrily We Roll Along"},"content":{"rendered":"

Director Richard Linklater knows that locking a cast into a 20-year filming schedule is risky, but he\u2019s optimistic his production of Merrily We Roll Along<\/a> will go off without a hitch (like, say, an unexpected actor\u2019s death). \u201cThat\u2019s the only way to tell this story, but people go: \u2018What if someone dies?\u2019 There\u2019s always some extreme thing that would prevent it from being made, but it usually doesn\u2019t happen,\u201d Linklater said at the Zurich Film Festival<\/a>, per Variety. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be collaborating with the future and just work that into the equation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Merrily We Roll Along is based on a play that later became a Stephen Sondheim musical about the interconnected lives of three friends, told over 20 years in reverse chronological order. The most recent Broadway production of Merrily starred Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. The revival won four Tony Awards, and a filmed version of the stage production was released in theaters in December. Linklater\u2019s movie will star Paul Mescal as Franklin Shepard, Ben Platt as Charley Kringas, and Beanie Feldstein as Mary Flynn. Linklater knows a thing or two about long-term filmmaking. He filmed Boyhood over 12 years with the same cast, tracking the coming-of-age story of the character Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane).<\/p>\n

The director hopes to achieve the same thing and accurately show the aging of the Merrily characters in his adaptation. \u201cI\u2019m hoping to get lucky again, but it\u2019s very different from Boyhood,\u201d Linklater said of Merrily. \u201cI\u2019ve always made music films, and it\u2019s fun to be making a full-on musical.\u201d Aside from a more ambitious timeline, Linklater said that Boyhood was created \u201cin complete anonymity,\u201d meanwhile all eyes are on his version of the musical, and he\u2019ll have to answer questions about it for 20 years. Trying to get a head start on those inevitable questions, Linklater offered a status update on the production timeline: \u201cMy progress report is this: It\u2019s nine sections in 20 years, and in a few months, we are filming a fourth. So see you in 2040.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Director Richard Linklater knows that locking a cast into a 20-year filming schedule is risky, but he\u2019s optimistic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-787228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}