Anthony LaPaglia’s Long-Planned Movie of A View from the Bridge to Co-Star Vera Farmiga, Mia Wasikowska & More

Looks like Tony-winner Anthony LaPaglia will finally get to play Brooklyn dockworker Eddie Carbone in his long-in-development feature film version of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. According to Variety, LaPaglia will co-star with Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) and rising star Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) in a movie to be adapted by playwright Andrew Bovell (When the Rain Stops Falling) and directed by Robert Connolly.

Farmiga will play Eddie’s wife Beatrice Carbone and Wasikowska will play Catherine, the beautiful niece who becomes the object of Eddie’s obsessive love. Broadway vet Sebastian Stan (Talk Radio, TV’s Gossip Girl) has been tapped play the Italian immigrant cousin who catches Catherine’s eye. Sam Neill will play an unspecified role in the movie, perhaps that of Eddie’s lawyer and the play’s narrator.

LaPaglia won the 1998 Best Actor Tony Award for View and secured the film rights shortly after that. “I had to go to England to find a producer [Marion Pilowsky] because no one here had the courage to take it on,” the actor told Broadway.com in an April 2010 interview during his run in the Broadway revival of Lend Me a Tenor. “Andrew Bovell has written a beautiful adaptation. He’s opened it up so it’s not a play on film. Arthur [Miller] was a big supporter of making it a full cinematic experience, and the Red Hook neighborhood will be as much a character as the people.”

LaPaglia’s 1998 Broadway revival co-starred Allison Janney and the late Brittany Murphy. The play was revived again on Broadway last season in a production starring Liev Schreiber, Jessica Hecht and Tony winner Scarlett Johansson.

The View movie will be filmed in Melbourne and New York beginning in June, funded by the Australian Producers Offset Fund and Film Victoria.