Emily Henry fans, meet your January Andrews.
Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor will star as January Andrews in the film adaptation of Henry’s 2020 bestseller Beach Read, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Kuang, who also co-wrote the adaptation of Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation for Netflix, is directing the feature take from her own script for 20th Century Studios.
Neal H. Moritz will produce via his Original Films. Karina Rahardja will exec produce. Sarah Shepard and Catherine Hughes are overseeing for 20th.
The literary affairs team, led by Clare Reeth, spearheaded efforts to land rights to the book.
Beach Read follows romance writer January Andrews who no longer believes in love, and Augustus Everett, a literary writer enduring severe writer’s block. When the polar opposites find themselves living in neighboring beach houses, they eventually devise a plan to help each other get out of a creative rut. Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. January will take Gus to varied places that scream romance while he takes her to interview surviving members of a cult. They may be on their way to writing their next book, but they may just find love in the process.
When teasing the adaptation, writer-director Kuang told THR, “I really enjoy writing Gus in Beach Read. I have this theory that an Emily Henry hero is a Yulin Kuang heroine. I spent a lot more time like thinking about this woman’s words, and the thing that I am drawn to in her work, they tend to be like the heroes that are more aloof, withdrawn, cold. So I really enjoyed diving in there.”
Kuang, who had said at the time that they were currently casting, also reflected on going from working on People We Meet on Vacation to Henry’s Beach Read. “They’re very different books,” she told THR. “They both have that thread of Emily’s writing that feels like a warm hug. But I think they’re warm hugs after different events. They’re very different books, so I didn’t want to just copy and paste.”
Henry is so well known for her emotionally resonant love stories that the author has been called the queen of rom-coms. Three of her other novels (Book Lovers, Funny Story and Happy Place) are also in development to become films. People We Meet on Vacation, starring Tom Blyth and Emily Bader, began streaming on Netflix in January.
To say the “EmHen” book universe has a devoted following would be an understatement. Each of her five books went on to become best-sellers with the author having sold seven million copies in the United States since 2020, according to The New York Times.
