Bill Hader will star in a new movie titled Empress of Serenity, which is notable for two important reasons. One, because Bill Hader is great and should star in lots of things. And two, because Empress of Serenity is loosely based on David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about a cruise ship experience gone awry. (Not, like, Poop Cruise awry. Just generally awry.) The Wrap has the details.
Backed by Good Universe, Empress of Serenity follows a man (Hader) who embarks on a cruise to bond with his father, who helps his son deal with intimacy issues.
Wallace’s original story recounts his crummy experience aboard a luxury cruise ship for one week in mid-March of 1995. He wrote about the troublesome voyage in an extended essay titled “Shipping Out” that was later re-titled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which anchored the author’s 1998 collection of writings.
It’s important to note that phrases like “inspired by” and “loosely based on” are being tossed about pretty liberally here. For example, Wallace’s original piece — which appeared in Harper’s, and is online, and is worth reading if you haven’t — did not involve any bonding with his father, in large part because his father was not on the boat. What it sounds like here is that the movie takes the general “cruises are weird and bad” idea of the piece and lays it over the father-son thing. Which is fine. But if you’re expecting “Bill Hader Stars as David Foster Wallace in David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” well, maybe don’t expect that.
The real shame here is that we were *thisclose* to living in a world where both of the guys in this scene have portrayed David Foster Wallace in a movie. That would have been something.
