Kristen Stewart (‘Love Lies Bleeding’, ‘Spencer’) has been cast as Sally Ride, the astronaut and physicist, in the upcoming Amazon MGM Studios TV series ‘The Challenger‘. The series is based on The New Guys, a book by Meredith E. Bagby, who collaborates with Kyra Sedgwick and Valerie Stadler from Big Swing. This will mark Stewart’s TV series debut.
The show is written by Maggie Cohn, who also serves as the showrunner. Cohn is known for American Crime Story, The Staircase, and Narcos: Mexico. Kyra Sedgwick’s Big Swing Productions developed the project and brought it to Amblin. It is executive produced by Sedgwick, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners, Stewart through her Nevermind production label, and Amblin’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey.
In 1983, Ride became the first American woman to fly on the space shuttle and became the pride of the nation. But like is too unfair to her, after three years the space shuttle Challenger blew apart 73 seconds into its ascent, that incident took the lives of seven crew members. She is not only a sign of women’s success but also plays a big part in mentoring STEM education. After leaving NASA, she encouraged young girls to take careers in science and engineering. In 2001, Ride co-founded Sally Ride Science, a company aimed at motivating and educating students in STEM fields.
Ride died from cancer at 61 in 2012. Her commitment to education and gender equality in STEM earned her numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, which was awarded posthumously.
In a statement, Sedgwick said, “This is something we’ve worked on at Big Swing since 2017, me, Meredith and Valerie, about this new class of astronaut recruited by NASA in the early 1970s.” she added, “Sally Ride was among them, and the focus is this newly recruited wild, feral group of astronauts who were all very diverse. And then on an Oppenheimer track, it also tells the story of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Challenger disaster that Ride took part in. Growing up in Florida, Meredith Bagby was obsessed with space and the shuttle, and she also watched the Challenger explode. Meredith got hundreds of hours of interviews with the members of that class, and we have relationships with all those living astronauts and they will be part of our brain trust on the show.
“She wrote the book, and it went on the bestseller lists. We wanted so much to tell this story as a limited series. Our goal at Big Swing is to tell familiar stories with a new perspective and point of view. I had a relationship with Maggie Cohn, and she fell in love with the book. Valerie had this dream of having Kristen Stewart, and after more than a year of trying to get Kristen this book through back channeling, she read it and she fell in love. Getting Kristen and Maggie was incredible, for a company nobody really knows yet. We are three girls with a dream,” says Sedgwick.
“Who better to play Sally Ride than one of the great actors of her generation? As they say in Hollywood, passion wins the day. Her passion for being an executive producer is vast. As dogged as we were about getting the script to her, she has been that dogged about getting it sold in the marketplace.”
Stewart recently starred in ‘Love Lies Bleeding‘ alongside Katy O’Brian. Also, she will next seen in Sam and Andy Zuchero’s directorial debut ‘Love Me,’ with Steven Yeun and Michael Angarano’s ‘Sacramento,’ which is currently in production.
