Night Manager star to film movie in Dublin

Elizabeth Debicki, who appeared in The Night Manager next to Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, is to star in Vita & Virginia alongside Gemma Arterton, Isabella Rossellini and Rupert Penry-Jones. Filming begins next month.

Debicki plays Virginia Woolf to Arterton’s Vita Sackville-West. A major part of the Bloomsbury set, the pair’s friendship and love affair reportedly provided the inspiration for Woolf’s novel Orlando.

Dublin will double for 1920s London in the film, as the city has a plethora of Georgian architecture and grand civic buildings which are often used to ‘play’ the capital or other English cities such as Oxford.

Chanya Button directs from a screenplay she wrote with Eileen Atkins, whose previous screenplays include a film adaptation of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Vita & Virginia is a co-production between Mirror Productions and Blinder Films with Evangelo Kioussis and Katie Holly producing respectively. Simon Baxter of Mirror executive produces alongside Christopher Figg, Nicolas Sampson, Norman Merry, Dave Bishop and Gemma Arterton. 

Director Button said of the film: “Vita & Virginia will be a fresh, provocative study of creativity, passion, sex and sexuality; and it offers an exciting opportunity to bring the story behind the creation of Orlando, one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest works to life in a bold, vivid, contemporary way.

“With my lifelong passion for Woolf’s writing, it is a great privilege to be working with such brilliant women as Gemma and Elizabeth, to bring the lives of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf to the screen.”