Gaumont & Tessa Thompson Partner for Luster Adaptation

Gaumont and Tessa Thompson’s Viva Maude have teamed up to develop an adaptation of Raven Leilani’s best-selling novel Luster for HBO.

Luster follows Edie, a young Black artist in New York City, who takes a white lover in an open marriage and becomes an unlikely mentor to his adopted Black daughter Akila. Thompson and Kishori Rajan will executive produce for Viva Maude, with American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lileana Blain-Cruz writing.

Alexandra Hunter, senior VP of creative, and Sean Wolfson, VP of creative, are leading the project for Gaumont under Terry Kalagian, executive VP of creative content in the U.S.

Luster was first published in August 2020 and has since sold nearly 150,000 copies in the U.S. and will be published in over 12 languages worldwide.

“We are beyond thrilled to be developing Luster with HBO and Viva Maude’s Tessa Thompson and Kishori Rajan,” said Nicolas Atlan, president of Gaumont U.S. “We were riveted by this groundbreaking book, written by the incredibly talented Raven Leilani, and are blown away at how quickly the series’ creative team, which includes our writers Lileana Blain-Cruz and Jackie Sibblies Drury, joint Obie Award winners for their work on Marys Seacole, has come together. We can’t wait to get started.”

Thompson said, “Luster marks the daring debut by Raven Leilani, a seminal voice for her generation. In her work, which defies categorization, there is an astonishingly singular quality that speaks to the spirit of the types of narratives Viva Maude aims to showcase—bold, beautifully crafted, unapologetically human, imaginative and unconventional. It is thrilling to be teamed with Gaumont and the stunning talents of Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lileana Blain-Cruz to develop this story at HBO, the perfect home.”