Johnny Depp has announced plans to produce and star in an adaptation of beloved Russian novel “The Master and Margarita,” according to reports. The announcement was made at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
He was attending the festival to promote the project, which is backed by his production company IN.2 Film, along with producers Svetlana Dali and Grace Loh. IN.2’s Stephen Deuters and Stephen Malit will also serve as producers. It will be produced in collaboration with Tribune Pictures.
No director or writer has been announced.
The original novel was written between 1928 and 1940 in the Soviet Union, with a censored version published posthumously in Moscow magazine in 1966 and 1967. The novel has two settings – the first is Moscow in the 1930s, where Satan appears as a professor, flanked by a valet, a black cat, a hitman and a female vampire. The second setting is the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate. How the two plots intertwine is only revealed later in the novel.
The book has had a huge cultural impact since initially being published, regularly appearing on lists of the best books of the century. It has inspired everything from the Rolling Stones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil” to Salman Rushdie’s incendiary “The Satanic Verses.”
Over the years there have been several adaptations of the novel, beginning in 1970. In the late 1980’s, Warner Bros. approached Roman Polanski about adapting the novel, but it was shelved after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most recently there was a Russian adaptation, directed and co-written by Michael Lockshin, which was produced in 2021 and released in 2024.
