Hope Davis and Michael Gandolfini fill out cast of Cat Person movie

Kristen Roupenian’s viral 2017 New Yorker story “Cat Person” is still set to become a movie, even though the far more interesting (true) story behind the story came out a few months ago, with Deadline reporting that director Susanna Fogel has filled out the rest of her movie’s cast. We previously reported that Nicholas Braun from Succession and Zola is set to star as Robert, the creep/asshole villain of the story, with Locke And Key’s Emilia Jones playing Margot, the target of his creepiness.

Now we know they’ll be joined by Hope Davis, Michael Gandolfini (fresh off of playing his dad, more or less), Liza Koshy, Fred Melamed, Isaac Powell, Isabella Rossellini, and Donald Elise Watkins. Deadline doesn’t say who they’ll be playing, but the central two are really the main part of the story anyway. Michelle Ashford, who worked on Masters Of Sex, is writing the script.

Interestingly, Deadline says the movie is going to be a “psychological thriller,” which was sort of the vibe of the original story, though it does feel like a slightly unusual label. The story is about Margot, a 20-something college student who works at a movie theater and strikes up a romantic relationship with Robert, a much older man who gradually reveals himself to be more of a dick as things start to fizzle out.

That’s kind of the whole thing, with the story’s unfortunate universality and its timely depiction of a man raging against rejection helping “Cat Person” go viral, so pitching it as a “psychological thriller” seems to indicate that there are going to be some expansions to the story—even if it’s just to make it fit the length of a movie.

That, in turn, will probably make the story behind the story (in which a woman realizes that she’s the inspiration for Margot in “Cat Person” despite having never met Roupenian) even more interesting, but oh well. Now, how long before we get the “Bad Art Friend” movie?