Zach Galifianakis in Talks for ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

With Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, we’ve learned to expect the unexpected. First, she made the decision to update the story, having a black protagonist and a mixed-race family at its center. Now, she’s trying her hand at gender-swapping, casting Zach Galifianakis in the role of Happy Medium, a character originally depicted as female.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Galifianakis is in talks for the role of a being who lives alone in a cave on a misty planet, and is “able to view different times and places.” Essentially, he has the ability to show Meg Murry (Storm Reid) and the rest of our heroes anything that’s going on anywhere in the Universe, at any time. The Medium is happy because he normally chooses to see only happy things, but when Meg and her friends show up on his doorstep, the things they request he show them become more and more depressing to see.

Galifianakis is mostly recognized for his comedies, but he often adds a very sensitive, tragic angle to the characters he plays, and will be able to imbue the Medium with an even mix of droll and melancholy that the character needs. And he’ll be in good company, as the cast for this movie is already ridiculously amazing: Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey will be playing Meg’s three helpers, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as her mother and Chris Pine as her father. There are only a few roles left to fill before the movie starts shooting later this month in LA, and DuVernay and her associates are still looking for non-white actors to play Meg’s brothers and her friend Calvin.

A Wrinkle in Time is scheduled to open in theaters sometime in 2018.