Jeremy Allen White finds tennis romance of his own

There's a new series coming to Netflix involving a bisexual tennis player that's based on a book by the same author as Call Me By Your Name, but it somehow isn't directed by Luca Guadagnino. That's probably a good thing—the guy already has a thousand and one projects on his plate. But it’ll be interesting, if a little odd, to see someone else take a stab at the type of material the Challengers director has become so synonymous with. 

Per Variety, the new series is an adaptation of André Aciman's 2017 novel Enigma Variations. While Timothée Chalamet and Josh O'Connor aren't involved in this one, it doesn't mean the show hasn't scored an it-boy of its own. Jeremy Allen White is set to both star and executive produce. Now Chalamet will finally have someone to talk to about the incredibly niche experience of having a biopic of an iconic musician, an Aciman adaptation, and a lookalike competition on his resume. Austin Butler has some catching up to do. 

The project is currently in development and doesn't have an official logline, but here's a synopsis of the book (via Variety):

Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul (White), whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men—whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park or on a New York sidewalk in early spring. Paul’s attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire. Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. But sooner or later, we discover who we’ve always known we were.

In addition to White, the Enigma Variations team includes Amanda Kate Shuman (The Wheel Of Time) as writer, executive producer, and showrunner, and Oliver Hermanus (Shirley Adams) as director and executive producer.