Kirby Howell-Baptiste has joined the ranks of actors who are in everything now, with Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella now joining a list of Howell-Baptiste projects that also includes Barry, The Good Place, Killing Eve, Why Women Kill, and Hulu’s pointlessly cruel Veronica Mars revival. This comes from Variety, which doesn’t know anything about the character she’ll be playing, but it seems unlikely that Howell-Baptiste will follow Emma Stone’s Cruella de Vil on the side of the puppy-murderers (the Variety story simply says Cruella was “obsessed with capturing” puppies, but we refuse to get on board with this sanitized version of history).
Cruella is being directed by I, Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, with Emma Thompson joining her fellow Emma alongside Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry. It’s still pretty far off, with a release date set for December 23, 2020, so it might be a while before we get to actually see much more from Cruella—beyond that first teaser image, at least.