First announced in 2021, executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson confirmed in March that American Love Story is still in the works. Jacobson told Variety, ‘We’re very much intending to [tell that story].’ Simpson continued, ‘We have great scripts on that. We’re trying to figure out when it’ll land. It is a story that really resonates right now. It’s amazing.
‘A lot of younger women are looking to her as sort of a representational icon of a certain period of time that’s really fascinating, and hopefully, we’ll be able to bring that to the screen soon.’
Naomi Watts was born in Kent, but her life changed after David Lynch cast her in Mulholland Drive from a headshot taken by her brother, Ben, as Francesca Carington recounted in the star’s November 2023 Tatler cover. The film came out in 2001; at the age of 32, Watts had finally made it, playing a bright-eyed young actor torn apart by a bewildering, dank Hollywood. The writer Lili Anolik posited that Lynch knew how to ‘fuse actor and role’, noting that Watts’s portrayal ‘doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels rawer, realer, beyond skill or artistry.’
