Ewan McGregor to star in film of Philip Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’

A film version of Philip Roth’s 1997 “American Pastoral” has been in the works for ages -- since about the time it won the Pulitzer Prize. But it’s getting close. It’s got a director, a script, and a star: Ewan McGregor.

McGregor will play the novel’s Seymour “Swede” Levov, a man of solid postwar New Jersey stock seeking the American ideal, whose family life is turned inside out by the political upheavals of the late 1960s.

The movie will be directed by Phillip Noyce (“Rabbit-Proof Fence,” “Salt”) and the screenplay was written by John Romano, who adapted Michael Connelly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” for the screen.

McGregor has regularly appeared in literary adaptations, from 1996’s “Trainspotting,” which was first a novel by Irvine Welsh, to the upcoming John Le Carre adaptation “Our Kind of Traitor.” He was a star of Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” for HBO, which died after the pilot (at the hands of “True Detective).

Over the decades, a few of Roth’s novels have been made into films with mixed success. Richard Benjamin starred in both “Goodbye Columbus” (1969), which was nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar for Arnold Schulman, and Portnoy’s Complaint (1972). Many years later later there came “The Human Stain” (2003) and “Elegy” (2008).

“American Pastoral” is slated to begin filming in 2015.

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