Casting Call: Roe v. Wade

In which we suggest who should star in the next big adaptation, remake, or historical film.

In honor of International Women’s Day last month, Monumental Pictures announced that they would be bringing the Roe v. Wade case to the big screen. The studio, owned by Alison Owen and Debra Hayward, hired Jennifer Majka, co-writer of BAFTA winner The Bigger Picture, to write the script.

The Roe v. Wade case is the iconic lawsuit from 1971 between Norma McCorvey, also known as “Jane Roe,” and Henry Wade, the Dallas County District Attorney. The point of the case: to overturn Texas’s restrictive abortion laws. After a long battle, during which McCorvey ended up giving birth to the baby she wanted to abort and giving it up for adoption, the Supreme Court agreed that Texas’s abortion laws were in violation of women’s privacy, and the laws were overturned. Owen, Hayward, and Majka’s vision is to re-tell this story with a focus on 26-year-old Sarah Weddington, the young Texan lawyer who would go on to influence one of the most divisive and most important Supreme Court decisions of the century.

The political climate of late has become increasingly aggressive against the rights of women over their own bodies, which is why these women felt it was important that this story be re-told. “It is one that is close to our hearts and hugely important, particularly in the extraordinary times in which we are living,” Owen told Deadline. “Women’s reproductive freedom is just as contested now as it was before this case and this is a story that everyone should know.” Monumental Pictures has yet to release more information about the film, so we have taken the liberty of making our casting suggestions.

Casting Call runs on Fridays. For more, click here.