'Promising Young Woman' actress Carey Mulligan to star in Netflix movie 'Spaceman' opposite Adam Sandler

The project marks the Oscar-nominated actress's fifth collaboration with the streaming platform

Carey Mulligan and Adam Sandler will star in 'Spaceman'. Photo: Focus Features via AP 

Netflix film Spaceman has added another feather in its star-studded cap: Oscar-nominee Carey Mulligan. The Promising Young Woman actress will star opposite Adam Sandler in the streaming platform's adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfar's novel Spaceman of Bohemia.

The 2017 sci-fi book tells the tale of Jakub Prochazka, a Czech astrophysicist who goes to outer space on an eight-month mission, leaving his wife, Lenka, behind on Earth. The duo’s marriage begins to fall apart even as Jakub befriends a giant talking spider.

According to the official story synopsis by Netflix, Spaceman will be "an intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery". Sandler plays Jakub who embarks on a dangerous solo mission to Venus, while Mulligan plays his wife.

The possibly imaginary alien spider, meanwhile, becomes Jakub’s unlikely companion, adept as it is at having “philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death”, which may just aid Jakub in returning safely to Earth and back to Lenka.

Spaceman will be directed by Emmy-winner Johan Renck (of Chernobyl fame).

Netflix movie stars

Spaceman marks Mulligan's fifth project with Netflix. The British actress was previously spotted in the Oscar-nominated Mudbound and The Dig with Ralph Fiennes, the mini-series Collateral and will star in the coming Bradley Cooper movie Maestro, a biopic on American composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre.

Sandler, meanwhile, has a multi-film deal with Netflix, and was part of its Murder Mystery and Hubie Halloween projects, as well as starring in the coming sports-comedy Hustle alongside Queen Latifah.

The Carey conundrum

"I am interested in being in films that when you leave the cinema at the end, you can't stop talking about it. Whether that's all entirely positive or negative, or a mixture of both," Mulligan recently told The National.

While it remains to be seen how meaty Lenka's role turns out to be in Spaceman, the wife of an astronaut who is friends with an alien spider does not quite have the same ring to it as Promising Young Woman, which might get Mulligan an Oscar. Watch this "space".