At Mipcom this week, the team behind BBC-Hulu series “Normal People” – led by Lenny Abrahamson, the Oscar-nominated director of “Room” – presented the first footage from the show, and explained how they approached the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel. Variety had exclusive access to the presentation.
Ed Guiney, one of the producers of Best Picture Oscar nominees “Room” and “The Favourite,” was an executive producer on “Normal People.” Element Pictures, the company Guiney runs alongside Andrew Lowe, started pursuing the rights to Rooney’s novel when it was at galley stage in the spring of last year, Guiney explained. Through Rose Garnett, head of BBC Films, Element then allied themselves with the BBC in their bid to clinch the hotly contested rights. Element then brought on board Abrahamson, with whom they have worked as the producer on all his movies. “‘Normal People’ and Lenny were meant for each other,” Guiney said.
“Very unusually, Piers Wenger, who is BBC’s head of drama, greenlit the show based on the book and Lenny’s interest as part of our proposal to get the rights,” Guiney explained. This allowed them to promise Rooney that the show would get made if she signed over the rights.
After Endeavor Content came on board to represent the rights outside the U.K., their first objective was to find a U.S. partner for the show, Lowe explained. While he and Guiney were in Los Angeles for the Oscars for “The Favourite” they – together with Abrahamson and Rooney – did a “dog and pony show” in L.A., meeting half a dozen U.S. buyers and “were really impressed by Hulu’s enthusiasm and commitment so it was quite an easy decision to go with them,” Lowe said. At Mipcom, Endeavor Content was presenting the project to international buyers.
The novel tracks the tender but complicated relationship of Marianne and Connell from the end of their school days in small-town west of Ireland to their undergraduate years at Trinity College in Dublin. At school, he’s well-liked and popular, while she’s lonely, proud and intimidating. A strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers. A year later, they’re both studying in Dublin and Marianne has found her feet in a new social world, but Connell hangs at the side lines, shy and uncertain. They weave in and out of each other’s lives. The book explores just how complicated young love can be.
“My response to the book was so immediate; it’s why the book has been such a phenomenon,” Abrahamson said. “When I read it I felt like these people are you and me. They are not in some extreme situation; they are not involved in some transgressive event. They are recognizably you and me, and yet at the same time the story is so compelling, so fresh, so original; it is about love, it’s about first love, it’s about how extraordinarily positive as well as challenging that can be.
“In the space at the moment where so much TV is often mining darkness in a cynical way, this for me was like a celebration and a deep and beautiful one.
