The Midwich Cuckoos creators talk main difference between new Sky series and John Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel
The Midwich Cuckoos writer David Farr and director Alice Troughton have opened up about the key differences between John Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel, Village of the Damned, and their brand new adaptation.
Ahead of the Sky show's UK premiere, the pair also talked about why they were keen to get involved in the project and why they elected to career-swap – and gender-swap – the main character.
"We both read the book when we were about 12, coincidentally. I was living in a small town, and it's a small-town drama in essence," Farr recently told Total Film and other press. "It really reflected the way I saw life as a teenager in the '80s, you know, a Thatcherite, Surrey town in South England – and the alienation, that strange existential dread. It resonated, and I waited a long time, I wasn't sure if we would ever get the rights. It was very difficult, but the producers amazingly got the rights back from Hollywood. As soon as that happened, I jumped on it, I was desperate to do it. So it's been a long term passion project for me."
Starring Synnove Karlsen, Aisling Loftus, Lara Rossi, Max Beesley, Keeley Hawes, this new take sees Hawes play Dr. Susannah Zellaby, a therapist who lives in the titular village and is very much at the center of the mystery. In the book, Zellaby is a professor, who is somewhat of an outsider (and played by George Sanders in the 1960 film). The mystery itself, however, is very much the same: One day, all the residents of a place called Midwich pass out and after they regain consciousness, they discover that every woman of child-bearing age is suddenly expecting. Accelerated pregnancies lead to a bunch of simultaneous births, before it soon becomes clear that there's more to the telepathic
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