Picture this... Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, and wait for it –- Carrie Brownstein! -- as lesbians in the 1950s! This is not your favorite dream from last night. It is a real thing! Portlandia’s Brownstein is the latest to join the cast of Carol, the Todd Haynes helmed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s benchmark lesbian novel The Price of Salt!
Blanchett will play the titular role of the socialite Carol (the original name of the book that Highsmith wrote under the pseudonym Claire Morgan), who meets and falls for a younger woman, a department store clerk and artist, played by Mara. Paulson and Brownstein, The Hollywood Reporter reports, will costar as a couple of the other women in Carol’s life.
Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt during the heyday of lesbian pulp novels, but her tale, which is often heartbreaking, varied greatly from the bleak outlook of so many pulp novels, offering up a glimmer of hope with its “happy ending,” in which she left it open to the chance that the women could end up staying together.
This project is making our lesbian heads explode. Out filmmaker Haynes' Far From Heaven -- a remake of the '50s melodrama All That Heaven Allows – that starred Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid, is possibly one of the greatest gay-themed films of the new millennium. New Queer Cinema luminary Christine Vachon is one of the film's producers, according to THR. And the cast includes Blanchett, Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Paulson (American Horror Story) and now Riot Grrrl Browstein. We're planning on camping out in front of the theater like Hunger Games fangirls!