Dear Gossips,
Peter Kavinsky, wait, no, I’m sorry, Noah Centineo did a photo shoot with puppies but that wasn’t the best thing I watched online yesterday. I mean, it was great. And here’s a screenshot of it…
…which of course when it finally comes out in full I will drop everything to watch it over and over again but for now, what I keep thinking about is the first teaser trailer for HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, adapted from Elena Ferrante’s book. My Brilliant Friend premieres in November and will be followed, eventually, by adaptations of the other three novels to complete the entire series about the friendship between Lenu and Lila.
Is this the show we’ll be obsessed with through the winter? It’s still summer and I’m already obsessing. It feels right, it gives me the same feeling I had when I was reading it. Which speaks to the care they put into producing it, auditioning over 9,000 hopefuls to get it exactly right, and having the actor speak in the Neapolitan dialect throughout, and shooting not far from Naples too on a meticulously constructed set. And that shouldn’t be a surprise, because Elena Ferrante, given what we do know about her (not much), probably wouldn’t have agreed to it otherwise. Some consider the Neapolitan novels “the greatest literary work of the last decade”…and this, remember, is a story about female friendship. I’m so excited. There’s so much to talk about. I appreciate that they’ve given us some time to re-read it, to prepare for it before it comes out.
If you haven’t already then, and it’s a long weekend for you, get started. Also if you’re interested, Vogue published a piece a couple of weeks ago with observations from when they were filming about the impact that this series could have, most interestingly in Italy.
Have a great weekend!
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
