According to Variety, Charlize Theron will no longer play the wife to Nicole Kidman’s role in The Danish Girl, the real life story of the first person to undergo a male-to-female transsexual operation. They also announced that Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) will be the movie’s director, and that he’s been in talks with the production staff for almost a year.
Written by Lucinda Coxon from a novel by David Ebershoff, the story revolves around Lili Elbe, who started out life as Einar Wegener in Denmark in the late 1800s and underwent five surgeries in 1931 to complete a transition from living as a male transvestite into a woman. Elbe died after complications from her last surgery which was to implant a uterus and allow her to “become a mother.”
No word yet on who will now play the role of Gerda Gottlieb, who traveled and lived with Wegener as a lesbian couple in Paris.