Watch Melissa McCarthy Forge a Path Into the Oscar Race in ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ Trailer (Video)

McCarthy plays biographer and notorious faker Lee Israel

Fox Searchlight has released the first trailer to Melissa McCarthy’s fact-based dark comedy “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” Check out the trailer above.

In the film, McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a once-successful biographer and magazine writer who became one of the most notorious forgers in recent American history.

Israel’s career stagnated in the 1980s amid rapidly changing public tastes, but she turned turned things around in the early ’90s when she unearthed several never-seen letters from icons like Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. The problem is that they were fakes, and she was quickly caught.

She pled guilty to fraud in 1993, but later found success — again — as a memoirist, outlining her criminal adventures in her final book, 2008’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” on which the film is based.

McCarthy steps into a role that previously had Julianne Moore attached. Marielle Heller (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl”) directed from a script by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty.

Anna Deavere Smith, Richard E. Grant, Jane Curtin and Dolly Wells costar. The film is set open October 2018.

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