Will Sharpe No Longer Directing

White Lotus star Will Sharpe is no longer directing Crying in H Mart. In an interview with SSense, Michelle Zauner confirmed that the adaptation of her best-selling memoir of the same name is “on pause.” “There were issues with the Hollywood strikes, and the director stepped away from the project. I spent a year working on the screenplay, which was a tough but rewarding process. I still have faith it will get made someday, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Right now, I’m focusing on other creative projects, so the film will have to wait.” The project was first announced in 2021, when MGM’s Orion Pictures snagged the rights to the indie musician’s intimate reflections about the loss of her mother to terminal cancer and her Korean identity. The book traces Zauner’s upbringing in a mostly white Oregon school, the time she spent with her grandmother in Seoul, meeting her eventual husband, and her band Japanese Breakfast, which will provide the soundtrack for the film.

“There were lots of things that resonated with me as somebody who is half-Japanese, half-British, spent my childhood in Tokyo,” Sharpe initially told People when he was originally announced as the director in 2023. “Some of the descriptions of being jet-lagged in your family’s kitchen felt very familiar to me.” Zauner, for her part, said in a statement that Sharpe’s “sensitivity as a director and an actor, his ability to find humor and grace within the tragedy of the everyday, and his own personal experience, having grown up between two cultures, make him the perfect director for this film.”