9 Months More!

Best Week Ever blogger/Les Miz superfan Michelle Collins made a few critical notes on Hugh Jackman's Jean Valjean get-up, but she missed one important detail.

That isn't facial hair on that beard.

But questionable beard aside, how exciting to have a photo at last, tweeted by Hugh Jackman himself! The movie's coming out December of this year, which seemed much closer until I counted it out on my fingers. At least we're almost down to only eight months. I hope we get more photos soon, especially of the particularly attractive, scene-stealing, and British Thenardier clan they've assembled.

Like the Sopranos, but with petty crime and more singing.

Minus poor Gavroche, who gets the Thenardier name rescinded in the musical (to be fair, he had already moved out at, like, age eight). And minus the younger Thenardier daughter, Azelma, who doesn't make the musical. And then the two youngest kids who don't even get names in the book let alone a musical appearance, whom the Thenardiers sell to a woman for her inheritance scam but then the woman gets arrested and the kids are left homeless. It's a happy family.

Fun fact/spoiler: in the novel, Madame Thenardier also dies, and Thenardier finally ends up taking his one known surviving family member, Azelma, with him to New York, where he invests in the slave trade.

If I wanted to hop on the novel-sized cutesy fanfiction of classic novels bandwagon, I would totally write about Azelma's new life in New York City as the wealthy daughter of a blood-monied tycoon. Obviously she would wear fancy dresses, worry about her family's dark past being discovered, and have to decide between an old-money New Yorker douche and a penniless but passionate abolitionist. Actually, that sounds like $$$. Don't steal Hugo's my idea, Darcy-does-such-and-such people. I'll get to that right after I finish the pilot for my Vautrin and Javert buddy cop series.