You’ll soon be able to get your last peek into the mysterious—and sex-filled—mind of Christian Grey.
Freed: Fifty Shades Freed as Told by Christian, the third and final book in E. L. James’ BDSM-themed trilogy that serves as a spinoff series for her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, now has a release date: June 1. The announcement about her sixth novel in the franchise was made Sunday, March 7, by Dominique Raccah, Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, on Sunday, March 7.The original trilogy is told from the perspective of Anastasia “Ana” Steele and chronicles her life with her dominant lover Christian Grey. Those books spurred a movie trilogy starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. The spinoff novels contain the same plot lines but told from Christian’s point of view. The first, Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, was published in 2015 and the second, Darker: Fifty Shades Darker as Told by Christian, in 2017. The upcoming third spinoff novel focuses on Christian and Ana’s marriage.
Fifty Shades Freed: Movie Pics
“This story has been a labour of love, one that my readers have been eagerly awaiting,” the author said in a statement about Freed: Fifty Shades Freed as Told by Christian. “For me, just as for Anastasia Steele, Christian is a challenging, infuriating, and endlessly fascinating character. Living in his head is exhausting, but I got to explore aspects of his life in Freed that we only glimpsed in the original trilogy, and to follow his emotional growth in response to Ana’s love and compassion.”
The movie Fifty Shades Freed, the last in the film trilogy, was released in 2018.
Check out 3 secrets about Fifty Shades of Grey:
1. Finding the Screenwriter
American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis tweeted in June 2012, “I’m putting myself out there to write the movie adaptation of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’…” And he meant it, publicly lobbying via Twitter and telling whomever would listen that he wanted to adapt E.L. James’ book for the big screen.
“I read the book out of curiosity. If it had not been as big of a hit, I would not have picked it up,” Ellis later told Vanity Fair. “I realized, Oh, this isn’t well written. It isn’t a good book. But this is a really good story, and it would make a really good movie.”
Instead, Universal’s Focus Features went with Kelly Marcel, who had penned the screenplay for Saving Mr. Banks—about Walt Disney’s struggle to get Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to let him make a movie about her magical nanny. The Wolverine scribe Mark Bomback was brought in to polish the Fifty Shades script in late October 2013.
“I had never been on a project with that much secrecy around it,” Bomback later told The Hollywood Reporter about the experience. “The set was on lockdown, and it was just really fascinating. I was able to watch something that everybody was speculating about sort of unfold in front of me.”
2. Angelina Jolie as Anastasia Steele?
There came word in June 2012 that Angelina Jolie had—if there was any truth to the rumor at all—perhaps had an informal discussion about directing the movie, having made her feature directorial debut in 2011 with Land of Milk and Honey.
Jolie went with the adaptation of Unbroken—the beyond-inspiring story of Olympic athlete turned World War II pilot Louis Zamperini, who crashed, survived 47 days floating in a life raft and then survived a POW camp—for her follow-up project instead.
Gus Van Sant, who like Bret Easton Ellis pictured a more graphic, possibly NC-17 film, and Danish director Susanne Bier were the last two names on a shortlist that James and Focus Features had whittled down—but producer Michael De Luca had been a producer on a movie Sam Taylor-Johnson was going to do before it fell apart, and suggested she take a meeting about Fifty Shades.
Asked how she’d handle the book series’ rabid fandom, she mentioned that her last movie, Nowhere Boy, had been about the Beatles. And she was hired.
3. Charlie Hunnam as Christian Grey?
Casting rumors ran rampant as to who would play Christian and Ana (Matt Bomer was flattered; Emma Watson was not; Taylor-Johnson wanted Robert Pattinson), but Charlie Hunnam really was planning to make the film his next big project after Sons of Anarchy ended.
“There are so many fans of that book and I know that on the surface, I’m probably not what everybody imagined,” the British actor told Entertainment Weekly in October 2013. “Because reading is so personal and people bring a character to life in their imagination, they feel ownership over that character.” He added, “That’s daunting if I allowed myself to think about it too much. I’m taking it very seriously and intend to explore the nature of who this character is, what motivates him—and also dr
