Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ will soon get a modern Netflix adaptation with a twist

Oscar Wilde’s homoerotic classic The Picture of Dorian Gray is reportedly getting a modern adaptation for Netflix.

Earlier this week, Deadline reported that the series The Grays is in development for the streamer from out über-producer Greg Berlanti’s Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television. The series will reportedly set Wilde’s 1891 tale of the impossibly beautiful Dorian amidst the contemporary beauty industry and will recast the main character and artist Basil Hallway as siblings.

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Katie Rose Rogers, a writer and co-producer on last year’s Fellow Travelers, is set to write the series and will serve as executive producer alongside her own sibling (and Berlanti’s husband) Robbie Rogers, an executive producer on Fellow Travelers. Berlanti will also serve as an executive producer.

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Rogers’s take on the story will be quite a departure, and not only due to its contemporary setting. Wilde’s novel has long been considered an extremely thinly veiled homoerotic classic for its suggestion that Basil, who paints the titular portrait that ages while Dorian remains forever young, is deeply in love with his muse. An uncensored edition published in 2011 restored 500 words of text to Wilde’s novel that make the character’s “romance of feeling” for Dorian explicit. It remains unclear how recasting the characters as siblings will impact the story’s queer themes. But if Fellow Travelers is any indication, it seem safe to bet on the fact that The Grays will feature plenty of homoeroticism.

Of course, this is far from the first screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray — though most have downplayed Wilde’s queer subtext. A 1945 film version featured Hurd Hatfield and Lowell Gilmore as Dorian and Basil alongside Angela Lansbury and Donna Reed (in a role created for the film), and earned Lansbury an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The novel was adapted for the screen again in 1970 by Italian director Massimo Dallamano. Similar to The Grays, that film — known variously as Il dio chiamato Dorian (The God Called Dorian), The Evils of Dorian Gray, The Secret of Dorian Gray, and simply Dorian Gray — set the story in 1970s London and starred openly bisexual Austrian actor Helmut Berger. The portrait of Dorian in the film shows him shirtless in jeans with a lavender scarf tied around his neck.

The 2009 film Dorian Gray, starring Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, returned the story to its 19th century setting and didn’t shy away from its main character’s omnivorous sexual appetites. However, as the 1945 version did with Reed’s character, the film also gave Barnes’s Dorian a virtuous female love interest (Rebecca Hall).

Most recently, a 2021 British indie adaptation featuring Russell Tovey, Joanna Lumley, and Stephen Fry set The Picture of Dorian Gray against the backdrop of contemporary social media.  

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