Images have been released from the first ever TV adaptation of the 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, the latest project from the writer/producer of the hit Netfix series Adolescence.
Jack Thorne helped Adolescence’s teenage star Owen Cooper become the youngest male to win a primetime Emmy. Now the writer will be hoping to repeat the success for another child actor, turning his attention to a BBC adaptation of William Golding’s novel.
The four-part series will follow a group of young schoolchildren who find themselves stranded on a tropical island without adult supervision after a deadly plane crash, and is expected to air next year.
Each of the episodes is titled after a character at the core of the story – Ralph, Piggy, Simon and Jack. The series has been made with the support of Golding’s family.
New images released by the BBC show the young cast, many of them making their professional acting debuts, filming on location in Malaysia. The castaways are played by Winston Sawyers as Ralph, Lox Pratt as Jack, David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbut as Simon. They will appear alongside an ensemble of more than 30 boys playing the desert island camp’s “biguns” and “littluns”.
In the midst of disaster and in an attempt to remain civil, the boys organise themselves, led by Ralph and supported by the group’s intellectual, Piggy. But Jack, who is in charge of signal fire duty, is more interested in hunting and vying for leadership and soon begins to draw other boys away from the order of the group and, ultimately, from hope to tragedy.
Thorne’s adaptation is billed by the BBC as truthful to the original novel – set in the early 1950s on an unnamed Pacific island – and will delve further into the book’s emotive themes of human nature, the loss of innocence and boyhood masculinity.
The boys were cast after an open call led by casting director Nina Gold, whose credits include Game of Thrones and Baby Reindeer.
Pratt has also been chosen to play Draco Malfoy in Amazon’s forthcoming TV series remake of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, while Winston Sawyers is the son of Parker Sawyers, an American actor who has appeared in TV shows including Lilyhammer, Succession and A Discovery of Witches.
Lord of the Flies, first published by Faber, has become one of the most popular books on the English curriculum for the last 70 years. Golding won the Nobel prize for literature in 1983.
