Malaysia-born actor Henry Golding will star alongside Fifty Shades of Grey’s Dakota Johnson in Netflix’s modern retelling of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion.
Golding, 34, who shot to fame as the heartthrob Nick Young in Crazy Rich Asians, will play Mr. Elliot, a distant cousin of Johnson’s headstrong character Anne Elliot, a single woman who lives with her posh family on the verge of bankruptcy.
Production for Netflix’s Persuasion is expected to begin this month.
In Austen’s 1814 novel, Mr. Elliot is described as charming but cold and calculative towards his relatives, who cast him aside after he married a woman of lower social rank. The character returns to the family after his wife died, and later showed interest in the women around him, including Johnson’s character, Anne, who was forced by her family to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth.
Netflix has yet to reveal the actor who will star as Wentworth. The announcement comes weeks after Golding announced the birth of his first child.
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