First look at BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People

The 12-part BBC series will star Cold Feet actress Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne and Paul Mescal in his first television role as Connell.

The series is described as “an exquisite and compulsive modern love story about how two people can profoundly impact each other’s lives”.

The book follows the relationship between Marianne and Connell from the end of their school days in a small town in the west of Ireland to their undergraduate years at Trinity College.

At school, he’s popular and clever while she’s bullied and excluded for being intimidating and different, but the pair establish a connection when Connell arrives to pick up his mother from her cleaning job at Marianne’s house.

When they are both studying in Dublin, the dynamic between them shifts as Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell struggles to feel at home.

The pictures show Edgar-Jones and Mescal in a variety of guises, from their school years to their time at university.

Rooney, who has penned the adaptation alongside writers Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2018 and Normal People was named 2019’s Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Rooney also serves as executive producer on the series.

Room filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson and Howard’s End’s Hettie McDonald are sharing the directorial duties on the series, which will air on BBC Three and BBC One next year.

Normal People will be produced by Element Pictures, the production company behind The Favourite, The Lobster and Room.

Abrahamson previously said: “It’s incredibly exciting to be bringing Sally Rooney’s extraordinary novel to the screen with such a brilliant cast and crew.

“In Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, I feel I have found two young actors who can vividly capture Marianne and Connell and bring alive the profound and beautiful relationship at the centre of the story.”