After Netflix’s ‘East of Eden,’ Florence Pugh Will Lead a Long-Awaited Fantasy Adaptation
Amanda M. Castro is a Network TV writer at Collider and a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, where she is an Associate Editor, and The U.S. Sun, where she previously served as a Senior Consumer Reporter.
She specializes in network television coverage, delivering sharp, thoughtful analysis of long-running procedural hits and ambitious new dramas across broadcast TV. At Collider, Amanda explores character arcs, storytelling trends, and the cultural impact of network series that keep audiences tuning in week after week.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Amanda is bilingual and holds a degree in Communication, Film, and Media Studies from the University of New Haven.
Florence Pugh is going back to the literary world. The actress, who stars in Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, has signed on to lead The Midnight Library, based on Matt Haig’s 2020 bestseller. Here, she will portray Nora Seed, who gets the chance to lead an extraordinary life by making different choices than those she has made so far. Garth Davis, who directed Pugh in East of Eden, is also on board to direct.
It is a long-awaited thing. StudioCanal and Blueprint Pictures finished acquiring Haig’s book in 2020, but they're only now announcing the film's cast and crew. Pugh will serve as producer alongside Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, and Anita Overland. Laura Wade and Nick Payne are writing the screenplay. Pre-production is expected to begin in Fall 2026.
What Is Matt Haig’s ‘The Midnight Library’ About?
Nora Seed doesn’t think her life is worth much as she’s lost her job, fallen out with people she cares about, and watched her ambitions slip away. After attempting suicide, she wakes up somewhere between life and death, in a library where every book contains a different version of her life. The possibilities are endless. What if Nora had stayed with her fiancé? What if she’d continued making music with her brother’s band? What if she’d become an Olympic swimmer instead of abandoning the sport? With help from Mrs. Elm, her former school librarian, Nora can step into these alternate realities and find out for herself.
None of these lives turn out quite the way she imagined, though. Fame doesn’t guarantee happiness, professional success comes with its own sacrifices, and even the domestic life she once might have envied has complications. As Nora continues to live new lives, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to see how a single decision could rectify her situation.
The Midnight Library became a bestseller and has sold over 15 million copies since 2020. Based on the concept that we all wonder every now and then, this book was inspired by a common question: what if you had made different choices in your life? Instead of dwelling on the multiverse itself, the novel tells Nora’s story of regret and her fight to find a reason to keep living.
Florence Pugh Reunites With ‘East of Eden’ Director Garth Davis
Pugh will play Nora in a role that takes her through several versions of the same life, each with its own circumstances and disappointments. It’s a demanding premise for a lead performance: Nora has to remain recognizable even as her surroundings, relationships, and achievements change.
Davis, whose credits include Lion, will direct from a screenplay by Wade and Payne. Wade wrote the stage play Posh, which inspired The Riot Club, and worked on the television adaptation of Rivals. Payne wrote The Sense of an Ending and We Live in Time. The pair will have to turn a largely internal story into something that works on screen without reducing Nora’s experiences to a series of lessons about appreciating what you have.
Pugh and Davis already have a working relationship from East of Eden, making their second collaboration worth watching. The Steinbeck adaptation and The Midnight Library are very different stories, but both put a complicated woman at the center of a literary narrative. Here, Pugh will have to carry a film in which the central conflict isn’t a single antagonist or external threat, but a woman's conviction that she’s somehow gotten her entire life wrong.
Haig is also involved as an executive producer, and he’s enthusiastic about the adaptation. In announcing the project, the author said he was happy Nora’s story had landed with the creative team assembled to bring it to the screen.
Can ‘The Midnight Library’ Make Its Many Possible Lives Work on Screen?
Nora tries on lives that look nothing alike, from performing onstage to conducting research in the Arctic. Each offers the filmmakers a chance to give the story a different look and atmosphere, but the film can’t afford to let those possibilities overwhelm the person moving between them.
Nora has spent so much time mourning the person she might have become that she struggles to recognize the value of the person she is. The alternate lives don’t erase her problems; they show her that disappointment isn’t exclusive to the life she has. Too much emphasis on the fantasy could leave the story feeling like a succession of alternate-reality vignettes. Too little, and the library loses the sense of possibility that makes Nora’s journey compelling in the first place. Wade and Payne will need to give each life enough weight to change Nora’s perspective while keeping the film focused on her decision to return to her own.
After six years in development, The Midnight Library is finally approaching production. Pugh is a strong choice to lead the adaptation, and reuniting with Davis brings back an established creative partnership. Whether the film captures what made Haig’s novel resonate with millions of readers will depend on one thing: making Nora’s journey feel less like a tour of the lives she missed and more like a reckoning with the one she’s still able to live.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.