Tom Hanks will play American President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) in the film adaptation of Lincoln in Limbo, an award-winning book by George Saunders.
The author himself will write the script for the film, which will be directed by Duke Johnson, from Anomalisa. According to Deadline, the production will combine stop-motion animation and live-action to explore “themes of love, empathy and human capacity in the face of unimaginable pain” through a cast of characters, “living and dead, historical and fictional”.
Considered one of the best books of this century by The New York Times, Lincoln in Limbo is the first novel by Saunders, a renowned short story writer, and won the Booker Prize in 2017.
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, led the country through the Civil War and abolished slavery. He was also the first US president to be assassinated.
Saunders’ plot, however, focuses on a single night, based on the report that, unhappy with the death of his 11-year-old son from typhus, Lincoln visited the tomb one night in February 1862 and cradled the corpse. From this scene, the author uses experimentalism to imagine the journey of the child, Willie, in an intermediate stage between death and rebirth.
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