Daniel Craig to star in Purity TV adaptation

Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is to be made into a television show starring Daniel Craig.

American premium cable and satellite television network Showtime is set to air a 20-episode limited series based on the novel, with production beginning next year.

Daniel Craig will star in the series and Todd Field, the director of “Little Children”, will direct it. Franzen, Field and the playwright David Hare will help to write the show, with Scott Rudin as one of the executive producers.

Showtime president and c.e.o David Nevins praised Franzen’s book as “an epic American novel that pulses with the energy of a psychological thriller... Purity promises to be the kind of taut, long-form, serialised storytelling that is the best of premium television, and is precisely what we at Showtime aspire to deliver.”

The novel, published by Fourth Estate is the story of a grand story of “youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder”, centred around Pip Tyler, who is saddled with $130,000 student debt, is squatting with anarchists in Oakland and doesn’t know who her father is.