Letitia Wright to play a creepy real-life sibling in Agnieszka Smoczynska's The Silent Twins
Letitia Wright has been fairly restrained, career-wise since attaining overnight superstar success back in 2018, when she co-starred to memorable effect in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as smartass smart person Shuri. Outside of reprising the role for the subsequent Avengers movies—and appearing in films for Donald Glover and Steven Spielberg, admittedly—Wright hasn’t been seen in front of the camera all that often since making her high-profile superhero turn. (“Where is Letitia Wright’s Dolittle?” clamored no one, essentially.) Now, though Wright has lined up one hell of a curveball follow-up, signing on to co-star alongside Tamara Lawrence in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s new drama about two sisters who become ever-more wrapped up in their own personal universe, to disastrous ends: The Silent Twins.
The film is based on a true story, recounted in Marjorie Wallace’s book of the same name, and centered on twins June and Jennifer Gibbons. Unwilling or able to communicate with anyone except each other (and sometimes, their younger sister Rose), the two women briefly embarked on a career as writers—before they were eventually incarcerated for more than a decade in the U.K.’s high-security Broadmoor Hospital. Jennifer died, reportedly under mysterious circumstances, in 1993; June began speaking to other people shortly after, and has given a few interviews afterward about her life. (And if that sounds a lot like the plot of a film from the director behind The Lure, well, Smoczynska seemed to think so, too.)
There’s no word on casting, although given that they’re both 26, we’re presuming that Wright and Lawrance will be playing the Gibbons twins. (This doesn’t feel like the kind of scenario where you want to go for a Parent Trap sort of thing.) Written by Andrea Seigel, the film will be Smoczynska’s English-language debut; her previous films include the mermaid nightmare The Lure and 2018's Fugue.