Juliette Binoche cast in Tennessee Williams adaptation ‘Camino Real’

French icon Juliette Binoche is to co-star in Ethan Hawke’s adaptation of “Camino Real”, the 1953 Tennessee Williams stage play about the inhabitants of a remote desert town.

French actress Juliette Binoche. Image: AFP/Yohan Bonnet

Ethan Hawke is revisiting “Camino Real”, the stage play he helped lead in 1999, by making it his third directorial feature.

The actor, known for roles in “Training Day”, “The Purge”, the “Before Sunrise” trilogy and 2018’s Oscar nominated “First Reformed”, co-wrote the adaptation.

An ensemble play whose archetypal characters pass through the square of a dead-end town, the fantastical “Camino Real” conforms to logic in the way a dream might.

On one side of the plaza lies a luxury hotel, while the other side is run-down and impoverished.

Its cast of characters are borrowed from elsewhere in the literary and cultural world: the name of its lead, Kilroy, refers to a graffiti meme popularized during the 1940s, while others are associated with iconic films “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca” as well as classic novel “Don Quixote”, “The Lady of the Camellias” by Alexandre Dumas the younger, Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and so on.

Juliette Binoche, whose performances have spanned a similarly wide range of blockbusters and dramatic fare (“Godzilla”, “Chocolat”, “The English Patient”, “Sils Maria”), is the project’s first announced cast member.

Though her role was not made known, the stage play’s cast suggests that she might portray Marguerite “Camille” Gautier (“The Lady of the Camellias”), notwithstanding rewrites at the hands of Hawke and his co-writer Shelby Gaines.

American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was feted for “The Glass Menagerie”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “Sweet Bird of Youth” and most particularly “A Streetcar Named Desire”, though “Camino Real” was one of his lesser-known works.

Hawke previously directed 2018 country musician biography “Blaze”, a romantic drama about an acting hopeful transplanted to New York called “The Hottest State”, and hotel-set multi-stranded story “Chelsea Walls”. RGA/JB

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