Natalie Portman stars in the trailer for Noah Hawley's feature directorial debut, Lucy in the Sky. For his first time at bat, the Fargo and Legion creator is joining forces with Oscar-winner Natalie Portman. The latter stars here as Lucy Cola, an astronaut who begins to lose her connection to her family when she returns to earth after a lengthy mission in space. She then enters an affair with her fellow astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), which only complicates the situation... and that's before Mark becomes involved with an astronaut trainee named Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz).

Fox Searchlight is releasing Lucy in the Sky (formerly Pale Blue Dot), but has yet to set an official release date for the movie. As a result, the studio has been slower than previously expected to get the film's marketing up and going, with no clear release target. Fortunately, that's starting to change today, thanks to the release of the first full-length trailer

The Lucy in the Sky trailer is now available online, ahead of its release in theaters. It's possible the preview will start playing on the big screen with Jordan Peele's Us as soon as Thursday evening. In the meantime, you can watch it here, instead (via One Media).


Hawley's script for Lucy in the Sky (which he cowrote with Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi) was loosely inspired by an incident in 2007 where astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested and charged with attempting to kidnap Colleen Shipman, an Air Force Captain who was romantically involved with William Oefelein: an astronaut who'd had an affair with Nowak, some two years earlier. The trailer and plot summary suggest that Lucy in the Sky will deviate from Nowak's real-life story in some ways, while at the same time covering many of the broader strokes. Similar to his work on Legion, it appears that Hawley is more interested in exploring Lucy's deteriorating psychological state and how that impacts her view of the world around her than anything else.

Lucy in the Sky has already drawn controversy over its premise, which is reportedly based on the idea that astronauts start to lose their grip on reality after being in space for long periods of time. Real-world astronaut Marsha Ivans even published an article in Time Magazine in 2017 that refutes the movie's setup, in a piece titled "What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Female Astronauts and the Reality of Space". The trailer footage is pretty visually striking (especially the outer space scenes) and, as mentioned, Hawley seems less interested in the tabloid-y elements of the story here, so it'll be interesting to see if Lucy in the Sky itself attracts similar criticisms or not.