Florence Pugh, who would’ve had a star-making appearance in Black Widow by now if the pandemic hadn’t screwed things up (luckily she had star-making appearances in Little Women and Midsommar already), has signed on to star in an adaptation of Nita Prose’s Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery The Maid. This comes from Deadline, which says Pugh will play the eponymous maid, a woman who works at a fancy hotel and “leaves every room perfect and pristine” while also “getting to know each guest’s dirty secrets.” One could argue that this makes her very bad at her job, but either way, her penchant for snooping comes in handy when a guest is murdered and she decides to try and solve the mystery. Deadline describes it as a “Clue-like, locked-room whodunnit.”
Interestingly, and in what may be an inadvertent way to keep people from spoiling the solution to the mystery, Deadline also says that the book version of The Maid won’t even be published until 2022. The Maid is also Prose’s debut novel, and if you’re wondering how a not-yet-published debut novel can get an adaptation with a big up-and-coming star, we should note that Nita Prose is the pen name of Nita Pronovost, vice president and editorial director of Simon & Schuster Canada—meaning it’s her job to make books, so clearly she’s earned some trust in the book community.
Now, if we could eventually get a crossover between The Maid’s universe and the world of gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc (as Knives Out was also a whole Agatha Christie-esque thing), then we’d be all set.