Richard Osman confirms a fresh take on the next version of ‘The Thursday Murder Club’
If you thought Richard Osman would satisfy our hunger with just a Netflix movie of The Thursday Murder Club, you couldn’t be more wrong. It turns out, the writer has a few more surprises in his basket, and his next move is just as unexpected as one of his murderers.
Osman has now confirmed that the film is officially heading to the stage. Yes, The Thursday Murder Club will soon become a theatre production. But here is the twist: the play won’t follow the same story as the books. Instead, Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce, and Ibrahim will be solving a brand-new mystery made just for the stage. Osman is co-writing the script with Tom Basden this time, and if you don’t know him, he is the comic mind behind shows like Peep Show and Fresh Meat, which means the dialogue will no doubt be extremely sharp and funny.
The surprising part here is that the news came only a few weeks after Netflix dropped its star-studded film version of the book, which hit number one on streaming charts in no time. The movie, starring Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie, drew big numbers even if the reviews were a little mixed. Still, fans clearly can’t get enough of the Cooper’s Chase gang.
Pierce Brosnan, who played Ron, even said the cast clicked from day one. “The quartet — Dame Helen, Sir Ben, Celia and I — we didn’t discuss anything,” he told Digital Spy. “We read the text, and we all knew what we had to do. From day one, it just flowed.” He also revealed director Chris Columbus asked him to grow a beard for the role, which Brosnan said helped capture Ron’s working-man spirit.
Moving into theatre feels like the perfect next step for Osman. The books have already sold millions, the Netflix movie brought the characters to an even wider audience, and now the stage play will let fans see them in a completely new way. A familiar group of characters in a completely fresh story. Nothing surprising here, as it’s exactly the kind of twist Osman is famous for.
No release date has been set yet, but it’s safe to say The Thursday Murder Club isn’t slowing down. And if Osman has taught us anything, it’s that you should never think you’ve guessed the ending too soon.