It’s a great time to be adapting classic literature for the screen. The latest is Sarah Polley’s take on Sylvia Plath’s 1963 masterpiece The Bell Jar, with Billie Eilish set to star as protagonist Esther Greenwood, Deadline reports. The novel was the only one Plath published, and came out under a pseudonym just a month before she died by suicide at age 30.
Here’s everything we know about the Billie Eilish-starring The Bell Jar movie so far:
There’s an Oscar-winning director attached to The Bell Jar.
Canadian filmmaker, actor, writer, and producer Sarah Polley will be directing the film. The last novel she adapted for the screen—2022’s Women Talking, based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews—earned her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The film will mark Billie Eilish’s movie acting debut.
Eilish is already a two-time Oscar winner, having co-written original songs for Barbie and No Time to Die with her brother, Finneas. She’s also been on TV, making her acting debut in Donald Glover’s Swarm, a series about an obsessed fan, in a role that earned her the People’s Choice Award for TV performance of the year and an Independent Spirit Award nod for best supporting performance in a new scripted series. She’s also co-directed her recent concert tour documentary with James Cameron.
Still, The Bell Jar will mark her film acting debut and her first leading role. Given the themes she’s best known for writing about as a ten-time Grammy winner—including and especially mental health and depression—it does seem fitting.
Many The Bell Jar adaptations have come—and gone.
In 1979, Marilyn Hassett starred as Esther Greenwood in director Larry Peerce’s adaptation of The Bell Jar, though it wasn’t faithful to the source material. Other than that, there have been a few notable attempts at bringing the novel to the screen that ultimately fell through: Julia Styles was attached to star in and produce the story in 2007, but eventually let the movie rights expire due to not having funding (Rose McGowan would’ve played Esther’s psychiatrist). In 2016, it was announced that Kirsten Dunst would make her directorial debut with a Dakota Fanning-starring adaptation, but by 2019, both actors had backed out. Later that year, a limited-series TV show on Showtime starring Frankie Shaw was meant to replace Dunst’s version, but that project, too, was eventually scrapped. In fact, Hollywood’s last major Path-related project came in 2003 when Gwyneth Paltrow played the writer in Sylvia.
A refresher on The Bell Jar:
The Bell Jar is Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel about Esther Greenwood, a young woman in the 1950s who takes an internship at a magazine in New York as her mental illness deteriorates. The poetic book details with stark clarity Greenwood’s descent into deep clinical depression and her subsequent treatment at a psychiatric hospital. The landmark novel explored how restrictive societies treat women, a theme that Plath dealt with in her other poems and short stories, and in her own life as a mother of two, married to fellow a fellow artist, the British writer and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.
The novel was an instant bestseller upon its release in the UK and US in 1963 and is often referenced in popular culture. It contains the famous fig tree passage, which showed up in peak Millennial series Master of None and later as a TikTok trend for the Zoomer generation.
The Bell Jar has already started filming.
As of June 2026, production is underway in Toronto. There’s no official release date yet, but stay tuned for updates.
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