A gift from the Giver! The official trailer for the highly-anticipated film adaptation of Lois Lowry‘s beloved dystopian novel, The Giver, made its debut on the Today show Wednesday, March 19 — and it sure does look thrilling.
The preview begins with a voiceover from Meryl Streep, who plays the Chief Elder in the movie. “From great suffering, great pain came a solution,” she says. “Communities, where disorder became harmony.”
The clip then cuts to Oscar-winning actor, Jeff Bridges, who plays the secret-keeping, memory-bearing character of the Giver in the flick. “The way things look, and the way things are, are very different,” he tells his young successor Jonas, played by Brenton Thwaites.
Katie Holmes and Alexander Skarsgard, who play Jonas’ parents in the film, also appear in the trailer, along with Taylor Swift, who’s flashed across the screen in a brief memory-exchanging scene between Thwaites and Bridges. (The entire cast grew close while filming the movie last year in Cape Town, South Africa.)
“There’s something missing from our lives,” says Odeya Rush, who plays Jonas’ love interest Fiona in the Phillip Noyce-directed film. The spooky trailer ends with Streep, who quips, “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.”
The Giver hits theaters on Aug. 15. Watch now!
