Following her turn in the provocative thriller “Love Lies Bleeding,” Academy Award-nominated actress Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) has set up one of her next projects, and it’s a first. Stewart will make her TV starring debut in the limited series “The Challenger,” about astronaut and physicist Sally Ride, best known as the first American woman in space.
Maggie Cohn, known as a writer on “American Crime Story,” “The Staircase” and “Narcos: Mexico,” will serve as the writer and showrunner.
The series is based on the book “The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel,” written by Meredith E. Bagby. That novel is said to be somewhat like “The Right Stuff,” which tells the never-before-told story of NASA’s 1978 astronaut class, which included the first American woman, the first African American, the first Asian American, and the first gay person to fly to space. The team was known as “The F*cking New Guys, by the military at the time, and the group was known as trailblazing explorers who broke barriers and blasted through glass ceilings.
In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle and became an instant celebrity in the process.
“As the first American woman to travel into space, Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model,” President Barack Obama said in a statement released by the White House upon her death in 2012 at the age of 61. “She inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars and later fought tirelessly to help them get there by advocating for a greater focus on science and math in our schools.”
Stewart is also setting up her directorial debut, “The Chronology Of Water,” which will star Imogen Poots, with Stewart and Andy Mingo credited on the screenplay adapted from the memoir, but there’s no word yet when it will shoot.
The project comes from Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions. They developed and brought the project to Amblin and are executive producing with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Stewart through her Nevermind production label. [Deadline]
Sally Ride image courtesy of the book Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space via Simon & Schuster.
