There’s a New Anne of Green Gables Coming to Netflix, and She’s Actually a Redhead This Time

As much as I love Anne of Green Gables, I’ve been gunshy about the prospect of a remake ever since the cover design was reworked to feature, of all things, a sexy, blonde Anne. But Netflix has announced the star of its new Anne of Green Gables series, and she’s not a sexy blonde at all. Phew!

According to Deadline, the new series is called Anne and is being produced for CBC–which aired the transcendent version starring Megan Follows that most of us probably associate with Anne Shirley–and Netflix, and it will star 14-year-old Irish and Canadian actress Amybeth McNulty. It’s supposed to debut this spring as an eight-episode series.

This is all pretty cool, especially since the showrunner is Moira Walley-Beckett, an Emmy-winning writer and producer from Breaking Bad. (She wrote the “Ozymandias” episode.) She’s writing the entire first season of the show, and if Breaking Bad and Anne of Green Gables sound like a pretty big thematic juxtaposition, it seems like Anne is going to be a bit rougher than we’ve seen before. Walley-Beckett says, “It’s not doilies and teacups, it’s life.”

It’s still going to be Anne, though, which means it’s still going to be full of fantasy and flowers and puffed sleeves. (Except when Matthew dies and an entire generation of viewers is traumatized for life.)

“This is a very grounded, real version of the story,” she said. “Life in Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s was a hard, gritty, scrappy life. It was messy, it was covered in red mud.”

Of course every child in the world wants to play Anne, and McNulty reportedly won the role from nearly 2,000 auditioning adolescents, even though she initially auditioned via Skype from her home in Ireland. The show will be filmed on Prince Edward Island, which means that even when it’s gritty, it’s going to look really, really pretty.

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