posted 06-10-2024 09:01 AM               

Kristen Stewart has been cast as Sally Ride.

Maggie Cohn will serve as the writer and showrunner; her credits include "American Crime Story," "The Staircase" and "Narcos: Mexico." This has been the hot property on the TV auction block this week, and Amazon is close to tying it down.

The hope will be to get this ready to time the series in proximity of the Challenger disaster anniversary. That happened 38 years ago, on January 28, 1986. For Stewart, this continues a career evolution which started after the Twilight Saga films, in which she has established herself as a most watchable actress with range.

Sedgwick explains this was a truly homegrown project, and not one that happened overnight:

"This is something we've worked on at Big Swing since 2017, me, Meredith and Valerie, about this new class of astronaut recruited by NASA in the early 1970s," she said. "Sally Ride was among them, and the focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse. And then on an Oppenheimer track, it also tells the story of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster that Ride took part in. Growing up in Florida, Meredith Bagby was obsessed with space and the shuttle, and she also watched the Challenger explode. Meredith got hundreds of hours of interviews with the members of that class, and we have relationships with all those living astronauts and they will be part of our brain trust on the show.