Actress Daisy Ridley’s upcoming Disney+ movie “Young Woman And The Sea” has added two new names to the cast in Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Stephen Graham.
The movie is about Olympic champion Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle (Ridley), the first woman to ever swim 21 miles across the English Channel in 1926, and is based on the book, “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,” by Glenn Stout.
The daughter of a German butcher from Manhattan, Ederle was a competitive swimmer who won gold in the 1924 Olympics, before attempting to crossing the channel.
She undertook the feat after first swimming 22 miles from Battery Park in New York to Sandy Hook, NJ, setting a record that stood for 81 years.
She then contracted with two newspapers and sold her story to finance her quest.
To aid in the long swim, she and her sister constructed a two-piece swimsuit, which was unheard of in the 1920s when skirt lengths were below the knee, and they also used candle wax to seal her goggles to make them leak-proof.
Australian actress Cobham-Hervey will play Trudy’s sister, Meg, who helped achieve her sister’s goal. She is best known as the lead in the biopic ” Helen Reddy, I Am Woman.”
English actor Graham played “Scrum” in two “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, and most recently was in “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” and the series “Peaky Blinders.” It was not mentioned what role he will be playing in this movie.
Ridley, of course, is best known as Rey from the third “Star Wars” trilogy of films.
Jerry Bruckheimer and Chad Oman are producing the film, and Joachim Rønning will direct from a script by Jeff Nathanson.
“Young Woman And The Sea” was first announced in 2020, but put on the back burner during the pandemic. No word on when the movie will air on Disney+.