A Rolling Stone Gathers Moss for Rosemary Kennedy Biopic

Elisabeth Moss will play Rosemary Kennedy in A Letter From Rosemary Kennedy. She’ll also produce and Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) is set to direct the biopic, according to Deadline.

Rosemary Kennedy was the older sister of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy. Her father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., had her lobotomized at age 23, after she exhibited rebellious behavior and mood swings and showed herself to be not as overachieving as her brothers. (She is said to have had intellectual disabilities, mental illness, and epilepsy.) The procedure was botched, leaving Rosemary incontinent and unable to walk and speak intelligibly. She spent the rest of her life institutionalized.

I smell Oscarbait. In 2016, it was announced that Emma Stone was attached to this project (then known as Letters from Rosemary), which is based on a Black List script by Nick Yarborough, which, according to Variety, focuses on “the moments leading up to the procedure and how it affected the family going forward.” And now Moss has the role.

No matter how this turns out—and given the subject matter, it sounds extremely hard to pull off without coming off as overly sentimental or offensive—we’ll always have this moment, which allowed for the headline on top of this post.