#‘Dear Evan Hansen’: Julianne Moore to Sing With Amy Adams in Movie Musical

A movie adaptation of the popular musical Dear Evan Hansen has been in the works since 2018, and its casting is really starting to ramp up. This past Friday, Oscar nominee Amy Adams was hired to play the mother of a dead teenager at the center of the story. Today, Oscar winner Julianne Moore is the latest person to join the Dear Evan Hansen cast. Learn about Moore’s role below.

The Hollywood Reporter brings word about the latest bit of casting for the Dear Evan Hansen movie, which tells the same story as the stage musical, which deals with the aftermath of a teen suicide and follows an awkward kid who lies and says he was secretly best friends with the deceased student. That lie “initially brings him closer to a crush and brings him attention but he must face repercussions when the truth surfaces.”

Ben Platt, who originated the role and won a Tony Award for his performance on Broadway, is reprising the lead role in the movie version, and Moore will play his mother, Heidi Hansen, a nurse’s aid who often leaves Evan home alone at night because she’s taking night classes to become a paralegal. The first song of the show, “Anybody Have a Map?” is performed by the two main mother characters: Heidi and Cynthia Murphy, the mother of the boy who dies. Amy Adams plays Cynthia, and you can hear the song they’ll sing together below:

As far as I can tell, this is Moore’s first musical. A couple of years ago, she starred in an independent film called Bel Canto, in which she played an opera singer, but in interviews at that time, she openly admitted that she couldn’t sing and that her voice was dubbed by an actual opera performer. So it’s quite the choice on the part of director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wonder) to hire her for this part – although the wiki page for the show indicates that her character only has three songs in the entire piece.

Steven Levenson, who wrote the book for the stage musical, wrote the script, and the music and lyrics come from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also wrote songs for La La Land and The Greatest Showman. Kaitlyn Dever, Amandla Stenberg, Colton Ryan, Nik Dodani, and Danny Pino round out the rest of the cast.

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