Eva Green walks alone across a deserted beach in new images from the BBC adaptation of the Man Booker prize-winning novel The Luminaries.
Casino Royale star Green stars opposite Eve Hewson and Himesh Patel in the drama set on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s South Island at the height of the 1860s gold rush.
Eleanor Catton has adapted her own novel, which tells a story of love, murder, magic, and revenge.
Directed by Claire McCarthy, the story begins in 1865 when Anna Wetherell (Hewson) has travelled to New Zealand to forge a new life.
On the last day of her voyage, a romantic first encounter with Patel’s Emery Staines fills her with great expectations for what lies ahead.
But the scheming fortune-teller Lydia Wells (Green) has other ideas for Anna, and lays a trap to ensure that the planned rendezvous between the young lovers never takes place.
After the betrayal, Anna’s fortunes decline and she is drawn into an elaborate plot of blackmail, involving opium, gold, shipwreck, fraud, and false identity, which ultimately finds her framed for murder and fighting for her life.
However, the bond between Lydia and Emery comes from the fact they are “astral twins”: they were born at the very same instant, and under the very same sky, which means that they share a single destiny.
When Emery vanishes without a trace, leaving Anna without an alibi for a murder she did not commit, the noose of the plot begins to tighten around her. Faced with the impossible, she must ask: do we make our fortunes, or does fortune make us?
The Luminaries is coming soon to BBC One.