Cate Blanchett in Talks for ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’

Cate Blanchett’s next film is generating major, awards-worthy buzz, and while most of us (the smart ones) anxiously await the release of Carol, the actress is already plotting another potential awards contender. Blanchett is reportedly eyeing a lead role in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Maria Semple’s best-selling novel.

THR reports that Blanchett is in talks to join the film with Linklater attached to direct following his departure from The Rosie Project, which also recently lost Jennifer Lawrence. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was adapted from Semple’s novel of the same name by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, the duo responsible for The Fault in Our Stars, (500) Days of Summer and, cutely enough, The Rosie Project.

Semple’s wildly creative novel is told from the point of view of the titular character’s daughter, in the form of letters, emails, various legal documents and correspondence between Bernadette and her psychiatrist. Here’s the official description from Amazon:

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Blanchett recently appeared in Truth, and can be seen next opposite Rooney Mara in Carol, which arrives in select theaters on November 20.