‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ Author and Movie Screenwriter Recently Dished on the Script

The fictional story of Old Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo and her seven failed marriages and one true love is one step closer to hitting the big screen. More than a year after it was confirmed Netflix was adapting Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2017 best-selling novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo into a film, the book’s author and the film’s writer, Liz Tigelaar, opened up about the status of the movie, revealing that the Evelyn Hugo script is “done.”

Jenkins Reid and Tigelaar, the creator, showrunner and executive producer of Little Fires Everywhere, opened up about the highly-anticipated movie during a recent interview with the Associated Press. Asked about the massive task of adapting the 400-page novel into a movie, Tigelaar admitted that she “did not know when I took on the Evelyn Hugo script what a big deal that Evelyn Hugo script was.” The book has become massively popular and is often raved about on BookTok, Tigelaar sharing that she “just knew I read the book and loved.” Tigelaar went on to reveal that the script for the film is complete.

“And so the script is – it’s done. It is now in the hands of the people who are going to make it, and I am so proud of it,” she said. “Taylor Jenkins Reed obviously was an amazing collaborator, amazing to work with, and I can’t wait to see it come to life. I’m so proud of the script and that that movie is hopefully going to be out there.”

While fans of Evelyn Hugo have long been waiting for a screen adaptation, Netflix’s March 2022 announcement that it was adapting the book into a film was met with plenty of concern. Evelyn Hugo was initially ordered as a limited series at Freeform, with many believing that the nature of the book – the book is split into section, with each section covering one of Hugo’s marriages – made for the perfect set up for the series, leaving many fearing that adapting the book as a movie would result in much of the story being condensed or cut out altogether. Jenkins Reid admitted that she also had those feared, though she said those concerns quickly dissipated after she received the script.

“Liz Tigelaar, who wrote the script is a phenomenal talent, and she showed up. I said, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this. I think you need to condense the story.’ And she said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And I go, ‘OK,’” she recalled. “And then she turns in the script and I was like, ‘I was wrong. You were right. You got it.’”

At this time, there have been no casting announcement for the Evelyn Hugo movie, though Jenkins Reid revealed in the same interview that there is “a short list of women” for the roles of Evelyn Hugo and Celia St. James. Along with Tigelaar writing the script, producers for the movie include g Liza Chasin for 3Dot Productions and Brad Mendelsohn for Circle of Confusion. Reid and Margaret Chernin are attached as executive producers.