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Claire Foy angling for a Merman in The Pisces

By Josh Grossberg
Claire Foy

How's this for a bait and switch: Claire Foy is going from First Man to… first Fisherman?

The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress is climbing aboard The Pisces, a romantic and fantastical drama based on the 2018 novel by Melissa Broder that will be helmed by Gillian Robespierrre.

According to Deadline, Foy will play Lucy, a PhD student who, after breaking up with her boyfriend, suffers from a bad case of writer's block and develops a chummy and, yes, erotic obsession with a merman, the mythological half-male, half fish creature of legend.

Pisces, of course, is the twelfth astrological sign in the Zodiac, a water sign whose symbol is the fish. And in the case of The Pisces, the object of Lucy's infatuation is a human male from the waist up and the tuna type from the waist down, whom she sees swimming one night in the sea. But this isn't merely a gender reversal take on Splash, with the Merman replacing the Mermaid. Rather, the fish tale's... ahem... hook is its arty mix of realism and giddy fantasy with an eroticism that makes Lucy question everything she knew about love, lust, and her choice of men.

Robespierre, who made a splash of her own with the 2014 indie hit Obvious Child, will co-write the script with Broder. The poet turned author's follow up novel, Milk Fed, hits book stores next month and is also being developed into a television pilot.

Here's hoping Foy can reel in an Oscar nomination.

The thesp, of course, is best known for playing Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of Netflix's The Crown, as well as playing Neil Armstrong's wife in the Oscar-nominated biopic, First Man. Other lead roles include Steven Soderbergh's mental ward thriller Unsane and playing fictional hacker Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider's Web, director Fede Alvarez's sequel to David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Foy will next costar opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the biopic Louis Wan, about the titular artist, premiering on Amazon later this year, and just wrapped shooting on STXFilm's remake of the French thriller My Son with James McAvoy. She's also set to topline the psychological horror pic, Dust, following a woman grappling with a haunted past while trying to protect her family during a devastating dust storm.


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