Award-winning European actors Vicky Krieps (Corsage, Phantom Thread) and Christian Friedel (The Zone of Interest, White Lotus) have joined the ensemble cast of The Idiots, the new film from Polish directors Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert (Woman of…, Never Gonna Snow Again).

Friedl’s White Lotus co-star Aimee Lou Wood, and Ripley actor Johnny Flynn headline the project in a cast that also includes Dune: Prophecy actress Barbara Marten, and Rainer Bock (Wonder Woman, The White Ribbon).

Szumowska and Englert co-wrote The Idiots together with Kasper Bajon and Bríd Arnstein, basing the story on Andrew D. Kaufman’s 2021 novel The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, which follows the lives of the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna during a period that inspired him to write his classic The Idiot.

Wood and Flynn play Anna and her husband, nicknamed Fiedya. The couple is on a honeymoon trip to Western Europe, but Dostoyevsky’s gambling addiction threatens to ruin them both. It’s only with the help of his courageous wife that the pair can pursue their joint vision of writing The Idiot, a book that was a commercial failure at the time but is now recognized as a literary masterpiece.

Ilya Stewart and Vladimir Zemtsov are producing The Idiots for Hype Studios and Gold Rush Pictures. Production is set to begin next month. The Match Factory are handling international sales.