Willem Dafoe is deepening his hold on the modern thriller: The acclaimed actor is putting his talents to the adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel “The Man in My Basement” alongside “The Color Purple” standout Corey Hawkins. Dafoe stars as Hawkins’ unexpected summer tenant who has ill intentions…
The logline reads: “Down on his luck, Charles Blakey (Hawkins) agrees to rent his basement to a mysterious stranger (Dafoe), unaware he may be letting in a force much darker than he imagined.” The film is set in 1994 Sag Harbor, New York, with Charles on the verge of losing his ancestral home to foreclosure. Anna Diop co-stars.
Nadia Latif makes her feature directorial debut with “The Man in My Basement.” She opted to have the film take place a decade before the novel is set (in the early 2000s) to coincide with the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide during the Rwandan Civil War of the ’90s. Latif teased to EW that the timeline shift was necessary for a meditation on “who gets to tell whose history,” with a “darker, scarier, and more baroque” tone than the source material.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about the novel since I first read it 20 years ago,” Latif said. “It’s such a dark, twisted, and wickedly funny journey into the heart of evil.”
Hawkins also told EW that the film “asks each of us to sit in the uncomfortable. We’re exploring mental health, trauma, exploitation, and yes, the nature of evil, but we’re also dealing with legacy, lineage, home, and love. A script centered on blackness in middle-class Sag Harbor in the ’90s is loaded with cultural significance. I love that Nadia honored all of that and was willing to deconstruct the script with us, interrogate it, and put it back together — all of the ugly, all of the beauty. She took the essence of Mosley’s novel and distilled it into something very unique.”
Hawkins, whose role in “The Man in My Basement” was originally to be played by Jonathan Majors before Hulu parted ways with the actor, previously told IndieWire that he was brought in to replace Majors a few months after he exited the film. “It’s an incredible look at a Black man who is experiencing trauma, but also legacy and family and curiosity,” he said of the feature. “I don’t think we’ve seen a story like this. It gave me an opportunity as an actor to go deeper than I’ve ever gone before. To bounce off of somebody like Willem Dafoe day after day after day, it was just like two bulls in the ring. It’s a gift.”
“The Man in My Basement” will premiere later this year in theaters and on Hulu. Check out the teaser below.
