Gwyneth Paltrow to star in ‘Blood, Bones and Butter’

The Hollywood Reporter announced that the Oscar award-winning actress is in negotiations to star in the movie adaptation of chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s food memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter. (You can read the 2011 Maclean’s review of the book here.)

Paltrow, who recently wrote a cookbook and also traveled around Spain with pal Mario Batali for a PBS TV show in 2008, knows her way around the kitchen. But she doesn’t immediately come to mind when I think of Hamilton, the owner and chef of Prune restaurant in New York, who by most accounts seems slightly rough-around-the edges, with a flair for using expletives poetically. Imagine Jodie Foster’s character in Taxi Driver–minus the prostitution bit–metamorphosed with Tatum O’Neal’s in Bad News Bears and grew up to be an accomplished chef with an MFA who writes beautifully.

Who, then, does come to mind? Right off the bat, maybe Meryl Streep, but at 63 she might not be able to pull off playing a part that will no doubt require portraying someone in their twenties through to their forties–no matter how extraordinary a performer she is. (Hamilton is 46, while Paltrow is 39, soon to turn 40.)

Francis McDormand perhaps? She’s 55 though. Maybe Tatum O’Neal? She’s 48. What about 43-year-old Rene Zellwegger? Martha Plimpton? Or Jennifer Lawrence of The Hunger Games fame! I like that one. But she’s just about to turn 22 (Maybe a flash-back scene?)

Maybe I shouldn’t resist this casting. Besides, I’m willing to give Paltrow–who had the acting chops to pull off the brooding Margo in The Royal Tenenbaums and Sylvia Plath in Sylvia–a chance. And I’ve always loved her in Emma. We won’t talk about Shallow Hal.

I think this could work.