Jeff Daniels to Star in Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Adaptation

Jeff Daniels has been cast as small-town lawyer Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning landmark of American literature To Kill a Mockingbird.

Directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher, the production will begin previews Nov. 1 at a Broadway theater to be announced, with opening night set for Dec. 13. The play is being jointly produced by Scott Rudin and Lincoln Center Theater, which has had multiple successes with Sher’s productions, including South Pacific, The King and I, Awake and Sing! and Oslo.

The large ensemble cast for To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Alabama in the 1930s, will include Celia Keenan-Bolger as Finch’s daughter Scout, Will Pullen as her brother Jem and Gideon Glick as their visiting friend Dill. The casting of adult actors in those roles would appear to confirm Sorkin‘s earlier indication of his intention to present the story as a memory play.

Also featured will be LaTanya Richardson Jackson as the Finch family’s housekeeper Calpurnia, Dakin Matthews as Judge Taylor, Stark Sands as prosecutor Horace Gilmer, Frederick Weller as Bob Ewell, Erin Wilhelmi as his daughter Mayella and Gbenga Akinnagbe as Tom Robinson.

Stephen McKinley Henderson, Phyllis Somerville and Liv Rooth complete the announced cast for the production, which will feature an original score by Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza).

Lee’s novel was written during the infancy of the Civil Rights Movement and first published in 1960, its startling depiction of ingrained racism in the Deep South making it an instant classic and a worldwide best-seller with more than 50 million copies in print.

Sorkin’s previous Broadway credits include the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men in 1989, and his saga of the birth of television, The Farnsworth Invention, in 2007. An Oscar winner in 2011 for his adapted screenplay for The Social Network, Sorkin is again nominated in the same category this year for Molly’s Game.

The writer previously collaborated with Daniels and Rudin on HBO’s The Newsroom.

Related Stories

Related Story

Writer Roundtable: Jordan Peele, Aaron Sorkin and More Explain Why the Job Feels Like "Exorcising a Demon"