Nick Frost and Lena Headey to star in Scandi comedy horror film Svalta
Nick Frost's Svalta has found its leading lady, with Game Of Thrones star Lena Headey reuniting with her Fighting With My Family co-star in the comedy-horror.
Written by Frost with James Serafinowicz and Nat Saunders, the film is set to shoot in Finland next year and follows a family on their summer vacation to a remote Swedish island with a dark past. There, they discover that a serial killer is on the loose and that unfortunately for them, the hostile locals have no interest in helping them.
US entertainment website Deadline reports that the film will be directed by Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, founder members of the Dutch comedy group New Kids, who have graduated through television to internationally acclaimed filmmaking.
Frost is also producing the film, which is being made by Wayward Entertainment, Resolute Films, Film Service Finland and XYZ Films.
Having played the parents of WWE wrestler Paige in Fighting With My Family, Stephen Merchant's comedic 2019 biopic starring Florence Pugh, Frost and Headey will have top billing this time around.
"Take a gentle English family and send them on holiday to a tiny Swedish island full of maniacs" Frost told Deadline. "Simple. Not so much Nuts In May. More 'Nuts in Mayhem'. After working with Lena in Fighting With My Family I couldn't imagine anyone else in the world I'd want to play Susan.
"So I was absolutely thrilled when I heard she'd not only read the script but she actually liked it enough to do me the great honour of saying yes and once again being my on-screen wife."
Named after the fictional island it's set on, Svalta also reunites Frost with Serafinowicz and Saunders, after they worked with him and Simon Pegg on their 2020 Amazon Prime horror-comedy series about paranormal investigators, Truth Seekers.
Perhaps controversially, Svalta has echoes of the 2011 murder of 77 people in Norway by far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 8 people with a van bomb in Oslo, before killing 69 participants of a Workers' Youth League summer camp in a mass shooting on the small island of Utøya.
Last month it was announced that Frost is among the stars of How To Date Billy Walsh, an upcoming high school rom-com for Amazon Prime that also features Guz Khan and Lucy Punch and stars Sebastian Croft and Charithra Chandran.
Frost also stars in the forthcoming dark ages comedy feature Seize Them!, alongside Aimee Lou Wood, Jessica Hynes, Paul Kaye, Lolly Adefope, James Acaster and Derry Girls star Nicola Coughlan.