Retirement homes are supposed to be for, well, retirement. But rest, relaxation, and bridge tournaments aren’t in the cards for one set of seniors. As you can see in the trailer above, this group of unlikely sleuths has uncovered a murder case, and they’re willing to risk their lives to solve it. Meet the foursome in The Thursday Murder Club, now streaming on Netflix. Based on the bestselling novel by Richard Osman, this is a whodunit with teeth — false ones, of course.
Read on for a more thorough investigation of the new Netflix-Amblin co-production, directed by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone filmmaker Chris Columbus and with a screenplay by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote, and flip through the star-studded first-look images of The Thursday Murder Club below.
By the way, Columbus tells Netflix, “This is the finest cast I've worked with since Potter. They’re just so incredibly well-prepared, and it’s because they do everything. They do theater, they do television, they do film, and they’ve developed those sorts of muscles.”
You, too, can be on the case. The Thursday Murder Club is now streaming on Netflix.
The film follows a group of friends in a retirement home who gather to solve murders for fun but find themselves caught in a real case.
Working with such an adept cast, director Columbus aimed to bring out a balance of humor, intrigue, and heart, and the result is a singularly moving, hilarious, edge-of-your-seat adventure. “There’s a wonderful mystery at its core, so mystery fans will be very happy,” he says. “But thematically it’s interesting that we’ve got four elderly people who are living in a retirement community and who are fascinated by death and murder. They are facing their own demise, yet at the same time they are obsessed with studying cold cases. I fell in love thematically with that. It’s comedic, but it’s also very emotional.”
The cast of The Thursday Murder Club includes:
The four main members of the Thursday Murder Club are played by a crew of talented thespians whose names you might recognize. Helen Mirren plays ex-spy Elizabeth, Ben Kingsley is ex-psychiatrist Ibrahim, Pierce Brosnan portrays ex–union activist Ron, and Celia Imrie takes on the role of ex-nurse Joyce.
Amblin founder Steven Spielberg stopped by the set during production and ran into an old friend — Paul Freeman, who played Belloq, nemesis and “shadowy reflection” of Indiana Jones, in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yes! The Thursday Murder Club is adapted from House of Games presenter Richard Osman’s 2020 novel of the same name. If you want to read about more cases the group attempts to solve, Osman continues the book series with The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, and The Last Devil to Die, as well as the newest installment The Impossible Fortune, which is released later this year.
Osman found inspiration for The Thursday Murder Club close to home: at his mom’s retirement community. “You just sit and chat with these people and they’ve lived these extraordinary lives. You hear these amazing stories and gossip and wisdom,” the author tells Tudum. “You think, ‘These people are so overlooked.’ The idea that these people with their wisdom and their invisibility would be the perfect people to solve [a crime] is exactly where The Thursday Murder Club comes from. Take these people who are underestimated but who have these incredible skills, put them together, and they can achieve anything.”
The story immediately resonated with producer Jennifer Todd when she first read the book in 2019. “I loved the characters, the story, their world,” says Todd. “I think the richness of the characters speaks to a larger audience. They are such a delight. You want to be with them — and [the] murders are such fun to solve.” Todd immediately sought Columbus, who has helmed many book-to-screen adaptations including the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson films, as director. “Chris is great with book adaptations, he understands when something has the reverence that this book has,” says Todd. “He was really smart about not letting us change things that weren’t necessary and his professionalism, his ease, and his positivity just made it such a delight to work with him.”
