Kristen Stewart has signed on for a new role and it’s something different. It’s a limited television series.
We have to admit that it threw us for a loop to see her sign on for a television series, but it excited us for two reasons. One would be that we get to watch her from the comfort of our own home and the second is for its subject matter. The actress will be playing Astronaut Sally Ride.
Sally Ride is the first American woman in space and that our friends, is a really big deal. She was also the youngest astronaut to have flown into space at the time. She was 32.
Ride was part of the NASA astronaut class of 1978. That was the first class that wasn’t just a bunch of white men. Ride made it to space in 1983, and became an instant celebrity. It was later revealed that Sally Ride was a member of the LGBTQ+ community, making her the first in the community to make it to space.
The show will be called The Challenger, which pulls inspiration from Meredith E. Bagby‘s book The New Guys. It has an impressive team behind it – developed from Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions and coming from Amblin Entertainment with executive producing with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners and Stewart through the latter’s Nevermind production label.
“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,” Kyra Sedgwick 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.
And commenting on Stewart she said, “She has never done television, but when she read this she became obsessed with telling the story of Sally Ride from her own unique perspective that I won’t even try to paraphrase because she is so eloquent about it. She was so stunning in these pitch meetings and that was a huge part of why it has been so competitive. She’s so compelling and was so rabid about telling this story about an American hero who had to hide who she was, in that time.Who better to play Sally Ride than one of the great actors of her generation? As they say in Hollywood, passion wins the day. Her passion for being an executive producer is vast. As dogged as we were about getting the script to her, she has been that dogged about getting it sold in the marketplace.”
It’s definitely a television series we’ll watch. We’re excited that K-Stew has show that much passion for it. Hey, everything goes back to Twilight and that means we’ll watch anything that she does.
But this one – we’re excited about. We know that Ride was on the team that helped investigate the explosion of The Challenger in January 1986 and we’re definitely hoping that it does touch base on that investigation.
