It looks like Ryan Murphy is putting together a dream team of A-list celebrities for his next film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) has recruited Julia Roberts (Snow White), Alec Baldwin (30 Rock), Matt Bomer (White Collar, Magic Mike), Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) and Mark Ruffalo (The Avengers) to star in the big screen adaptaion of The Normal Heart, which is based on the book and play written by Larry Kramer. The Normal Heart details the rise of HIV/AIDS in New York’s gay community in the 1980s. Ruffallo will play Ned Weeks, who is one of the first to raise an alarm when what was then known as “gay cancer" surfaces in New York. Roberts will play Emma Brookner, a wheel-chair bound doctor who is one of the only doctors in New York talking the new disease seriously. That role is the one that won Ellen Barkin her Tony last year. Bomer is playing Ruffalo's fashion journalist lover Felix Turner. John Benjamin Hickey (The Big C) played the role on Broadway and it won him a Tony as well. Baldwin is playing Weeks' brother, a lawyer having a hard time dealing with his sibling's sexuality. The only person who is from the play that is starring in the movie is Parsons, who will reprise his role, that of a Southererner who is a gay activist and part of a gay men’s health crisis group.
Kramer wrote the screenplay and Murphy will direct. The last film Murphy directed was Eat, Pray, Love, which also starred Roberts. Sounds like a good movie worth checking out when it's done. Even though HIV is still a pandemic in the United States, I thought we moved on from stories about gay men dying from AIDS. That was so 1992.
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