Riley Keough (The Girlfriend Experience) and Colman Domingo (Fear the Walking Dead) are set to join up-and-comer Taylour Paige in A24's stripper saga Zola, Collider has exclusively learned.
Zola chronicles the sordid tale of 20-year-old stripper Aziah Wellsrose, aka Zola, whose story of a wild two-day adventure with a sex worker, the sex worker's boyfriend and a pimp went viral on social media in 2015, drawing the attention of celebrities such as Ava DuVernay, Missy Elliot, Keke Palmer and Solange Knowles.
Keough will play the sex worker, and Nicholas Braun is being eyed to play her doting, bipolar boyfriend. Domingo will play the charming-yet-violent pimp, according to sources. Zola seems like a cool project for all these actors, as A24 believes it to be "a defining and legendary entry in the deeply American road trip genre," which indicates a great deal of confidence in the project.
Janicza Bravo (Lemon) is directing from a script by playwright Jeremy O. Harris, Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts, based on the Rolling Stone article "Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted." James Franco was previously attached to direct the film, and he's expected to retain a producer credit on Zola, which heads into production this fall.
A24 held a nationwide casting search for Zola, with Bravo discovering Paige in a coffee shop a year before her official audition, which saw her beat out 700 other actresses.
Paige is a trained dancer from Inglewood, California who recently appeared in White Boy Rick and counts Ballers, Grey's Anatomy and BET's dance team series Hit the Floor among her TV credits. She's represented by CAA, Untitled and Stone Genow.
Keough currently stars in Jeremy Saulnier's Netflix thriller Hold the Dark and will soon be seen in David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake and Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built. She has also wrapped the Netflix film Earthquake Bird and the indie thriller The Lodge. Keough is represented by CAA, Thirty Three Management.
Domingo can currently be seen as the high school principal in Assassination Nation, and he next appears in Barry Jenkins' drama If Beale Street Could Talk. He has also wrapped Noah Hawley's upcoming Natalie Portman movie Pale Blue Dot. He's repped by the Gersh Agency and Liebman Entertainment.
