Looks like Natalie Portman is coming back to Hollywood in a big, big way. THR reports that the actress will star in and produce Lynne Ramsay’s first post-We Need to Talk About Kevin project, an intriguing Western that comes complete with a Black List script. Brian Duffield penned the film, Jane Got a Gun, which ended up on last year’s Black List of best unproduced screenplays (that list included scripts like Graham Moore’s The Imitation Game, Andrew Baldwin’s The Outsider, and John Scott’s Maggie also popped up on the list).
The film is focused on “a woman whose outlaw husband returns home barely alive and riddled with bullet wounds. She is forced to reach out to an ex-lover and ask if he will help defend her farm when her husband’s gang eventually tracks him down to finish the job.” The film has reportedly spark a bit of a bidding war in Cannes.
While Portman took some time off from acting after her Oscar win for Black Swan and the birth of her first child, she appears to be jumping right back in with a number of bold, meaty choices. She also has two Terrence Malick films lined up and, though she did not end up with the role, she was the Wachowskis’s first pick for their Jupiter Ascending. But can Portman go rough and tumble? Can she ever: