Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway will star in ‘Mother Mary’, featuring new Charli XCX songs

A24 said “Mother has arrived.” 

Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel will be starring in the “epic pop melodrama” Mother Mary from movie studio A24, whose film Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the 2023 Academy Awards. Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff will also be collaborating on original songs for the project.

David Lowery, who wrote and directed the critically acclaimed 2021 film The Green Knight, will also pull directing and writing double duty on Mary, as the Hollywood Reporter first reported on Tuesday. Hathaway will play an as-yet unnamed fictional musician, and the movie will follow her relationship with “an iconic fashion designer” played by Coel. Details are scarce and it’s not yet certain whether or not that relationship will be explicitly romantic. But considering that sapphic A24 movies and movies about famous fictional lesbian musicians are really having a moment right now, our money’s on yes. 

Mother Mary will be filmed in Germany, although it’s not clear when production on the film will begin. 

Michaela Coel is perhaps best known as the showrunner and star of I May Destroy You, the acclaimed limited series that explored the thorny aftermath of sexual assault. She also recently appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as Aneka, a combat instructor who has an extensive queer storyline in the comics. That queer storyline was part of why Coel was sold on the role. “I thought: I like that, I want to show that to Ghana,” Coel said in a November interview with Vogue. ““People say, ‘Oh, it’s fine, it’s just politics.’ But I don’t think it is just politics when it affects how people get to live their daily lives. That’s why it felt important for me to step in and do that role because I know just by my being Ghanaian, Ghanaians will come.” 

Hathaway is, of course, a longtime gay icon, as she has been since playing Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries. More recently, Hathaway has finally been receiving the cultural reappraisal that she’s long deserved, with critics praising her performance in Apple TV+’s WeCrashed. She recently starred in a film adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen, which premiered at Sundance and has similarly received rave reviews. 

This story originally appeared on them.