Jonathan Bailey and Bill Nighy are to star as lovers in Insomniac City, a new film directed by Dominic Cooke based on the memoir by writer and photographer Bill Hayes.
Bailey will play Hayes, with Nighy as the neurologist Oliver Sacks. The film adapts Hayes’s 2017 memoir of the same name, and he and Cooke wrote the screenplay together.
The story follows Hayes after he moves to New York City from San Francisco following a painful loss. As he rebuilds his life, he falls “unexpectedly in love with both the city and Oliver Sacks.”
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Cooke described the project in glowing terms.
“Insomniac City is a rare story that feels both profoundly intimate and epic in scope,” he said.
Troy Lum and Andrew Mason of Brouhaha Entertainment are producing, alongside Bailey, Mike Goodridge and Gabrielle Tana. Altitude is handling worldwide sales, and will introduce the film to buyers at the American Film Market.
It has not been announced when filming will start, and no other cast members have been named.
Casting Bailey and Nighy together gives the project two of the best-known British actors in a story about love between two very different men.
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