Ariana DeBose, Rachel Brosnahan, Peter Dinklage and More Join Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain in King Lear Film

A star-studded cast has been assembled for Lear Rex, an upcoming cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear starring Academy Award winner Al Pacino as the title character and two-time Tony nominee and Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain as Goneril.

Pacino and Chastain will be joined by Tony nominee and Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose (Cordelia), Emmy winners Rachel Brosnahan (Regan) and Peter Dinklage (Fool), Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield (Edmund), Chris Messina (Cornwall), Ted Levine (Kent), Danny Huston (Albany), Matthew Jacobs (Gloucester), Rhys Coiro (Oswald) and Stephen Dorff (Poor Tom).

The film is written and directed by Bernard Rose, who told Deadline, “It is enormously exciting to get the opportunity to work with this extraordinary cast that Al, Barry and Sharon have put together to tackle this radical, but accessible adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play.”

According to the initial report in Deadline, the film is a labor of love for Pacino. “Al and I are going to make a bold, cinematic Lear that will be as accessible [and] moving and powerful as the play was for its original audiences,” said Rose. “The devotion myself and everyone I know have for The Godfather, Heat and many of his other films, Pacino puts into Shakespeare. He believes those masterworks should be ‘tried more often’ in film, in order to ‘take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.’”

Pacino's Shakespearean credits include Julius Caesar in the New York Shakespeare Festival (1988); a Tony-nominated performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on Broadway (2010); and directing the theatrical docudrama Looking for Richard (1996).

Principal photography is set to commence on Lear Rex in Los Angeles on August 12.