Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder Will Read Secretary Under Jane Schoenbrun’s Direction

I’m going to be really honest with you. Sometimes in the news business, we need to try hard to make something sound a little more exciting or interesting than it actually is. We’ll tack on a few more adjectives. Get a little ahead of ourselves. Look, my generation is responsible for millennial-style Buzzfeed headlines about how "instantly obsessed” we are, so I get it you think I’m an unreliable messenger for what I’m about to say next.But when I found out, via IndieWire, that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma director Jane Schoenbrun is directing Hannah Einbinder and Them’s Mother of the Year Gillian Anderson in a live reading of the 2002 movie Secretary… well, I was beside myself. Gobsmacked. Rooted to the spot by the sheer power of that sentence. There are few pairings of talent and material that could get me to log back on after a full work day, but here I am, in the blogging mines at 9 PM, so compelled by my absolute devotion to the Einbinder-Anderson duo that I had to put words onto digital paper.According to IndieWire, which exclusively reported the news earlier today, the live reading will happen July 28 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, with the rest of the cast TBA. But Secretary is mostly a two-hander, which means we already know everything we need to know. Unless Schoenbrun wants to do some radical subversion of casting expectations, Anderson will play fastidious attorney E. Edward Grey (played in the film by a man, James Spader) while Einbinder will play his submissive secretary Lee Holloway (originated by Maggie Gyllenhaal).In the 2002 movie, which blew my closeted queer mind when I first saw it, Edward and Lee begin as employer-employee but gradually discover a dominant-submissive dynamic that helps the younger woman begin to heal from her history of self-harm. Too many people think of Secretary as a titillating movie that has a spanking scene in it, when it is in fact a deeply emotional film tha