Starburns Industries has added another remarkable group of performers to Lincoln in the Bardo. Meryl Streep, Colman Domingo, Bill Hader and Tom Waits are joining Duke Johnson's adaptation of George Saunders' Booker Prize-winning novel.
Willem Dafoe, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage were announced shortly before them. Tom Hanks remains the unusual anchor of the project: he will play Abraham Lincoln in live-action while also producing through Playtone.
The dividing line between the living and dead is also a visual one
Johnson is not approaching the material as a conventional historical drama. Lincoln in the Bardo will combine live-action filmmaking with stop-motion animation, using two very different visual languages for a story already divided between the material world and an enormous chorus of dead characters.
Hanks appears as the flesh-and-blood Lincoln. The supernatural side will lean into animation, an approach that feels unusually well matched to Saunders' book, where historical accounts, invented voices and ghosts constantly occupy the same space.
Johnson has been here before, at least technically. He co-directed Anomalisa, a film that used stop-motion not as a novelty but as part of its emotional language.
Meryl Streep gets four characters
Streep is voicing Abigail Blass and Elizabeth Crawford, two of the cemetery's spirits. She will also play an Angel trying to draw lost souls out of the bardo and a Demon attempting to keep Willie Lincoln trapped there.
Hader has two parts as well: Eddie Baron and one of the Three Rakes. Waits voices Jaspar Randall, a former dancehall performer whose long stay in the bardo has reduced him to little more than a singing trace on the ground, plus one of the Demons pursuing Willie.
Domingo plays Thomas Havens, a formerly enslaved man whose ghost develops an important connection with Lincoln.
Dafoe, Dinklage and Bailey were already waiting
Dafoe voices Reverend Everly Thomas, while Dinklage plays Hans Vollman and Bailey takes Roger Bevins. Those names matter because the novel does not operate around one straightforward narrator.
Saunders built the book as a collision of voices. Ghosts interrupt each other, contradict each other and cling to wildly different explanations for why they remain in the cemetery. A neat, linear adaptation would almost miss the point.
At its center is a father visiting his dead son
The story takes place in 1862 after the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie. Saunders builds from accounts surrounding the grieving president's visit to his son's crypt and transforms that private moment into something supernatural.
Willie exists in the bardo, a transitional state between lives, surrounded by spirits unable or unwilling to leave. The ghosts must help him move on before he becomes permanently trapped.
That makes this a Lincoln story with an unusually intimate scale. The Civil War remains outside the cemetery, but the dramatic center is a father trying to process the death of his child.
George Saunders is adapting his own novel
Saunders wrote the screenplay himself. Johnson directs and produces through Starburns Industries, with Hanks and Gary Goetzman producing through Playtone.
CAA Media Finance and WME Independent are handling sales around TIFF: The Market. No release date has been announced.
There is also no official first-look artwork showing how the live-action and stop-motion worlds will actually meet. Given everything this adaptation is promising, that reveal may matter almost as much as another famous name joining the cast.
