‘Yesteryear’ Author Reveals Her Dream Cast for the Upcoming Anne Hathaway Movie
'The Odyssey' star will produce and lead the film based on Caro Claire Burke's viral novel
Key Takeaways
- Anne Hathaway, 43, is set to star in and produce the ‘Yesteryear’ film adaptation.
- Author Caro Claire Burke says Jesse Plemons would make a good Caleb.
- No other cast members have been officially announced for the film yet.
In case you didn’t hear, Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling novel Yesteryear is officially becoming a movie and the author is already fancasting some of the roles! She’s also opening up about what it’s like to work with Odyssey star Anne Hathaway, who will be taking on the lead role and executive producing the film. To learn more, keep scrolling!
What we know about Anne Hathaway’s role in ‘Yesteryear’
For those who haven’t read the book, the plot follows trad wife influencer Natalie Heller Mills after she wakes up one day in the 19th century. It was published in April 2026 and was a Good Morning America book club selection. But, before all that, Hathaway, age 43, got an early copy of Yesteryear and decided she wanted to turn it into a feature film with her production company Somewhere Pictures.
“I read a draft two years ago and I knew the intense feeling that I had for it, so it’s been really fun watching people discover it,” the actress told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “I have friends writing me being like, ‘what? How?…’ One of my friends wrote me and said, ‘I can’t remember the last time I re-read a book.’ People are just loving it and I couldn’t be happier for Caro. What a triumph for her. And now we just have to do the movie justice.”
Hathaway is expected to play Natalie in the film, which is still in pre-production. She has also worked closely with Burke on the adaptation.
“We sold the rights to her [Hathaway] after I went to auction for the book. We sold it in the U.S.A., and then sold it to the U.K., and then we did film rights,” Burke told The New Yorker this past weekend. “In that time period, I spoke to her and her Amazon team, which is probably a group of roughly 15 people, a number of times throughout the summer.”
“Film rights take longer to finalize than book rights do. So it was during that time period that I already knew what the book was. We already had the ending. We already had Natalie,” the author continued. “In some ways, she was pitching to me, because there were other people who were vying at the time to have the rights. I mean, she’s [Hathaway] phenomenal, but that was why we were talking about Natalie, because it was her sharing her vision for a film that will undoubtedly be different from the book. This book is so interior, and to make a transition to film, it would have to become more exterior.”
Burke will serve as an executive producer on the film, working closely with screenwriter Hannah Friedman on the script, which is currently being written.
“I don’t think it can be a one-to-one, and that is my favorite type of adaptation. What we talked about a lot is that you have to take creative liberties,” Burke told The New Yorker. “And those were the people that I wanted to work with—people who were not pretending that it was going to be a page-by-page faithful reimagining, where someone’s just talking in their head for seven hours.”
Who else is involved in the ‘Yesteryear’ film?
As of publication, no one else has been cast. But that hasn’t stopped Burke from fancasting some of the roles, including Caleb, Natalie’s husband, and the rest of her mysterious family.
“I feel like Caleb would have to be someone who isn’t a household name. Someone with a Jesse Plemons [star of Bugonia and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping] vibe could be a good Caleb—he’s so good at being harmless at times and also unbelievably terrifying. He will have to be able to behave in that way to channel Caleb,” she told Variety in May. “For the father-in-law, I’ve always imagined someone with a Woody Harrelson sensibility. I feel like Woody Harrelson has a crackling energy to him, where, again, he can be really friendly in one moment and then really scary in the next. Those are really the only people I’ve thought about. The children will just have to look relatively like Anne.”
Yesteryear is available for purchase now wherever books are sold.
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