Netflix’s ‘The Hunchback, Soul of Paris’ gets a release date as Vincent Cassel leads darker Quasimodo reimagining
For almost two centuries, most people have known about Quasimodo either via Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel ‘The Hunchback of Notre-Dame’ or Disney’s 1996 musical based on it. Both versions tell the story of a kind and lonely bell-ringer who lives in the Notre-Dame Cathedral. While Disney added talking gargoyle friends and music, Hugo’s novel is a dark and gloomy Gothic tale where gargoyles are just part of the architecture. Now, Netflix’s next adaptation changes the storyline completely. According to What’s on Netflix, the streaming service has chosen November 27 as the international release date for its upcoming French movie, ‘The Hunchback, Soul of Paris,’ featuring Vincent Cassel. It retells the story of a character who is thought to have inspired Quasimodo. The adaptation is based on the theory of British archivist Adrian Glew, who believed that Hugo might have based Quasimodo on a real stone carver during his search for information about the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
The story is set in 1830 Paris, on the eve of the July Revolution, as a cholera epidemic spreads through the city. Quasimodo is caught between political turmoil and unrequited love, while being pursued by a doctor planning to use him for medical experiments. Netflix describes it as a survival drama rather than a romantic story, with a runtime of 1 hour and 43 minutes. Director Jean-François Richet cast Cassel almost overnight. Speaking with Vanity Fair France, Richet said, “I had to find an actor very quickly, almost over the weekend. So I called him on Friday evening, specifying that I needed an answer by the following Monday. He read the script and found it promising.”
Meanwhile, Benjamin Voisin plays the doctor who is after Quasimodo, Karim Leklou plays the Director of Security in charge of the hunt for the man, and Daphné Patakia plays a role Netflix has not yet revealed, but the images point toward Esmeralda. The cast is completed by Noémie Lvovsky, Sébastien Pouderoux, Eli Nachmani, and Alexis Rosenstiehl. The project has already changed titles twice, starting as ‘Quasimodo, l’âme de Paris,’ later being promoted as ‘Quasimodo, the Soul of Paris’ in English, and finally transforming into its current title, ‘The Hunchback, Soul of Paris.’ Hugo’s novel was, in part, a cry for help to save Notre-Dame Cathedral when it had fallen into disrepair, and it is generally believed that the success of the book is what helped kick-start the campaign to restore the iconic monument.
