Harrison Ford’s Best Movie Getting A Series Adaptation With Jake Gyllenhaal As Star
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jake Gyllenhaal is in talks to star in a remake of the Harrison Ford thriller Presumed Innocent for Apple TV+. The story is based on the bestselling novel by Scott Turow that was previously adapted into a 1990 film directed by Alan J. Paluka.
This time around, the legal thriller/drama will be a limited series. It will retell the story of Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, a lawyer whose colleague/mistress, Carolyn, is murdered. As if that weren’t unsettling enough, the evidence begins to point to Sabich as the killer, and he must fight to clear his name.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Harrison Ford are both known for their commanding presence as leading men, so it is no surprise that the former is being considered to walk in the latter’s shoes. Gyllenhaal is also an Oscar and Tony nominee.
The creative team for Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent includes huge names like J.J. Abrams, Dustin Thomason, and David E. Kelley, all of which will play an important role in its production. Kelley will take on the role of showrunner as well as an executive producer. Other executive producers on the project include Abrams, Thomason, Matthew Tinker, Rachel Rusch Rich, Sharr White, and Jake Gyllenhaal himself (Harrison Ford does not appear to be involved in the project at all at this point).
Unlike the previous version, Kelley’s adaptation will delve deeper into darker areas, including “obsession, sex, politics, and the power and limits of love, as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Jake Gyllenhaal will have to work hard to live up to the original screen adaptation, however. Harrison Ford and the rest of the team who worked on the film earned multiple award nominations, with the screenplay making a particularly big splash. The movie spawned two sequels: a television miniseries called The Burden of Proof based on another novel by Turow, and Innocent, a made-for-television movie based on the sequel to the original novel.
While it is too early to tell how fans and critics will respond to this new Presumed Innocent series, Jake Gyllenhaal has already been working on his Harrison Ford impression. In an interview with Ellen Degeneres in 2019, Gyllenhaal impersonated the actor’s character from his other blockbuster movie The Fugitive (in which Ford’s character was also accused of a crime he didn’t commit).
The audience loved it (although Ford himself seemed a bit underwhelmed), so all Gyllenhaal has to do now is channel that talent and intensity into this new role.
In the meantime, audiences can catch Jake Gyllenhall in Disney’s Strange World and the upcoming Guy Ritchie film The Covenant, as well as Doug Liman’s remake of Road House. Or, if you’re more of a Harrison Ford fan, you can watch him instead in Apple TV+’s upcoming comedy series Shrinking, where he stars as a curmudgeonly but strangely effective therapist. You can also catch him in next year’s fifth installment of the Indiana Jones movie series.
Or, if you’ve got a bit more time, you could also just go and check out the Presumed Innocent book series by Scott Turow, since it is apparently a goldmine of ideas for film and television show creators.
