‘The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar’ trailer: Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl short film debuts on Netflix this month [Watch]

Christopher Rosen
·3 min read
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Welcome to the wonderful world of Henry Sugar.

On Thursday, Netflix released the first trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest project, the short film “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar,” based on the short story by Roald Dahl. The project is one of four Dahl shorts Anderson made for Netflix, all of which will arrive on the platform at the end of September.

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Adapted and directed by Anderson, the new short film stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, and Richard Ayoade. 

“I had the thought to try to adapt Henry Sugar maybe almost 20 years ago when I was staying at Gipsy House (which is Dahl’s family house in Buckinghamshire), and I had a simultaneous thought which was: ‘I don’t know how to do this,’” Anderson said in press notes provided by Netflix. “But over the years, the Dahl family — Felicity Dahl and Dahl’s grandson Luke Kelly — kept the rights to the story set aside for me. When I finally had the moment of inspiration, the idea was: ‘I am equally interested in the way Dahl tells the story as I am in the story itself.’ The story completely hooked me as a child, but if you take away his words, well, I guess, it’s not a movie I felt compelled to do. It’s a great Dahl story, but if I do it using his words, his descriptions, then maybe I know how to do it.”

Anderson said he never really considered making “Henry Sugar” as a feature-length film. “I’m not sure this method of storytelling would have worked for that. It made more sense to me to do these short stories as short story movies,” he told Netflix. As a result, the four shorts feature the same actors in rotating roles. 

Netflix will release the four short films over four consecutive days in September, starting with “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” on September 27. The film’s running time is 39 minutes. The following days will bring “The Swan” (September 28, 17 minutes), the stop-motion animated short “The Rat Catcher” (September 29, 17 minutes), and “Poison” (September 30, 17 minutes). 

Watch the trailer for “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” below.

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