William Moseley is leaving Narnia behind for 19th-century China.
“Hudson Taylor’s impact on Christianity in China is unparalleled,” said Moseley, who played Peter Pevensie in THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA trilogy, praising the missionary’s “determination, kindness and faith, through extremely difficult circumstances” in the announcement of the new feature HUDSON & MARIA.
Half Crown Media and Burns & Co. Entertainment revealed the cast Monday, with principal photography set to begin in Malaysia in early August. Poppy Drayton (CHARMED, THE LITTLE MERMAID) will play Taylor’s wife, Maria, opposite Moseley.
Ludi Lin (POWER RANGERS, MORTAL KOMBAT) rounds out the lead trio as Wang Laijun, Taylor’s Chinese friend and traveling companion. Writer-director Matt Mikalatos is helming the movie from his own script.
“I’m so thankful for the incredible cast who have come together from across many cultures and nations to tell this story,” Mikalatos said. “Hudson and Maria would be pleased to see such a diverse group of talented people representing them on screen.”
Related: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN
The international ensemble runs unusually deep for a faith-driven period drama. It also includes Jeremy Swift (TED LASSO), Tan Kheng Hua (CRAZY RICH ASIANS), Rupert Graves (SHERLOCK), Darren Lim (THE LITTLE NYONYA), Jemma Donovan (JIMMY), Catriona Munro (NCIS: SYDNEY), Ben Van Lier (M3GAN 2.0), Matt William Knowles (SON OF THE SOUTH), Vanessa Yao (KUNG FU), Wang Wei, Kate Sullivan and Cedric Gegel.
Set during the Opium Wars, the movie follows the real Hudson Taylor as he rejects the colonial habits of Western missionaries in China and instead adopts the local language, dress and customs to push inland with the gospel. Taylor went on to found the China Inland Mission in 1865, which grew to more than 800 missionaries by 1910 and helped shape the Chinese church that endures today.
Drayton’s Maria is no side character. Maria Dyer Taylor, the orphaned daughter of missionary parents, was fluent in Chinese and served alongside her husband until tuberculosis took her life in 1870, just days after burying two of the couple’s children.
“I could not be more excited to play Maria in HUDSON & MARIA,” Drayton said. “It is an honour to be part of Matt’s masterful vision and bring to life a woman who contained such unwavering compassion, resilience and courage.”
Burns & Co. has been quietly stacking its slate with story-driven biopics. The company is also behind JIMMY, the Jimmy Stewart biopic starring K.J. Apa, which hits theaters Nov. 6, and is in pre-production on THE MYTHMAKERS, an animated feature about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
That Lewis-and-Tolkien project makes for a curious full circle: Moseley became famous playing a character Lewis invented and now shares a studio with the team adapting Lewis’s own life.
Aaron Burns, Jack McClintock and David Cook are producing HUDSON & MARIA. James Hudson Taylor IV — the missionary’s great-great-grandson — and Angela Galgani Sullivan serve as executive producers.
According to a Half Crown Media production update, five weeks of filming will wrap by mid-September, with a theatrical release aimed at late 2027 or early 2028. More information is available at hudsonandmaria.com.
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