Albertine Clarke's "The Body Builders"

Albertine Clarke received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida and studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she won the Lewis Edwards Memorial prize for creative writing. Raised in London, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Here Clarke dreamcasts an adaptation of The Body Builders, her debut novel:

The Body Builders follows an alienated young woman, Ada, who believes her body has been replaced with an identical synthetic copy. Her relationship with Atticus, an older, married man, and the breakdown of her relationship with her mother, are the triggers which send her spiralling out of reality and into a self-directed dream-space designed especially for her.

I watch a lot of movies, and I wrote the book with cinematography always in the back of my mind. Even before I started writing I knew who I would want to direct it: Yorgos Lanthimos, with his uncanny ability to walk the line between tragedy and farce. Yorgos, if you’re reading, I’m waiting for you.

So, if Yorgos is our director, who would play Ada? Emma Stone, Yorgos’s longtime collaborator, wouldn’t be quite right. Ada is cold and detached, tormented by her feelings of unreality, the lack of connection between her and the world around her. I imagine somebody somewhat stormy and androgynous. Emma D’Arcy, who I recently saw in Alexander Zeldin’s play The Other Place, would be ideal.

In the first part of the novel, Ada spends time primarily with her cousin Francesca, and her friend and occasional love interest Patrick. Francesca is manic, performative, sexually chaotic – everything that Ada’s not. Sydney Sweeney, with her talent for playing women who are desperate to be wanted, seems like a good fit, but could she nail the British accent? Patrick is robust, attractive, grounded. He is the connection between Ada and the world around her, even if ultimately he fails to reach her. Leo Woodall has the right type of charisma, or Daniel Kalyuua.

Ada’s mother and father are the other two major characters in the first half. Arnold Schwarzneggar unquestionably is the father, who is a body builder with German heritage (making him Austrian felt too on-the-nose). I watched Pumping Iron more than once while I was writing the novel. Ada’s mother would be played by whoever Yorgos felt was best.

In the second part of the novel, things get weirder. Ada moves from the “real world” to The Facility, a supernatural environment where her thoughts and feelings manifest externally. The Facility is ruled over by Don, an extraterrestrial being wearing the face of a middle-aged man, dressed in a doctor’s white coat. Who walks the line between unsettling and strangely comforting? Tramell Tillman, or Jon Hamm.

Finally, there’s Atticus, charismatic, sensitive, slippery, attractive in a way that is not immediately obvious. He’s also the only American character, heralding from Los Angeles. There are many men who could play this role, but for me, it could only be Al Pacino in his Michael Mann-directed era of Heat or The Insider. Since those days are long past, I would settle for Bradley Cooper or Matthew McConaughey, both icons of American masculinity who both look like they occasionally dip into Russian literature.

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Q&A with Albertine Clarke.

--Marshal Zeringue