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‘Queens Gambit’ Co-Creator and Anya Taylor-Joy Reunite for Nabokov Adaptation

Scott Frank is developing an adaptation of Nabokov’s 1932 novel “Laughter in the Dark”—and he’s picked the face of his über popular Netflix show to star at its center once more.

If you, like seemingly half the world, devoured The Queen’s Gambit when it debuted on Netflix in November, you might love what its co-creator, Scott Frank, has coming up next. On The Ringer’s The Watch podcast, the Oscar nominee revealed he’s developing an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1932 novel Laughter in the Dark—which will once again star Anya Taylor-Joy, who brought Queen’s Gambit heroine Beth Harmon to life.

On the podcast, as originally reported by IndieWire, Frank described the project as “a valentine to movies. I’m going to do it as a film noir and a movie within a movie, and it’s a really nasty, wonderful, thriller.” Nabokov wrote Laughter in the Dark decades before his most well known work, Lolita—and, as IndieWire notes, used some material from the former to create the latter. The novel centers on the dysfunctional relationship that forms between its protagonist, a middle-aged art critic named Albert Albinus and a teenage aspiring actress and model.