Carey Mulligan stars alongside Lily James and Ralph Fiennes in Netflix drama The Dig

First look images of The Dig were released by Netflix on Wednesday.

The new drama, which is based on a book by John Preston, sees Carey Mulligan star alongside an A-list cast which includes Lily James, and Ralph Fiennes.

Focusing on Carey’s wealthy widow Edith Petty, the film reenacts the discovery of Britain’s most famous archaeological dig in 1939 when an Anglo-Saxon ship burial was found in Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk.

The discovery was known as ‘Britain’s Tutankhamun’, and Preston’s novel finds its characters in a country on the eve of war.

Examining class tensions, love and loss through the eyes of its central characters, it sees Edith, amateur archaeologist Basil Brown (Fiennes) and his fellow excavator Peggy Preston (James) work on excavating the burial mounds at the widows home. 

Other cast members include Johnny Flynn, and Ben Chaplin, Ken Stott and Monica Dolan, who are playing as-yet-unrevealed roles in the film.

Netflix have announced the film will be released theatrically, however a release date has yet to be revealed.  

As a historical fiction novel, The Dig is said to stray from the true story behind the dig in certain aspects, as the author has taken literary licence with the subject.

Preston is the nephew of one of the excavators, Peggy Piggott (named Preston in the film), and while he only became aware of this connection after he began writing the book it is the first to focus heavily on her discoveries. 

Piggott was the first person to discover gold in the burial ship, and her story is one of the novel’s central narratives.  

This is not the first Netflix film to star Lily, as she most recently appeared in the streaming service’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Sources recently claimed Lily and her co-star Armie Hammer grew close after appearing in passionate scenes in the adaptation of the 1938 novel.

Reports from sources close to Armie and his estranged wife Elizabeth Chambers said their marriage went into a nose-dive in the Autumn of 2019 after she found passionate texts and letters from a mystery woman who signed herself ‘Adeline’.

While Adeline’s identity remains a mystery, sources also claimed the co-stars grew close after appearing in passionate scenes in the adaptation of the 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel, and insiders added that the pair formed a close bond on set.

Armie and Elizabeth announced their split in July after 10 years of marriage and it was reported earlier this month that he had filed for joint custody of their children.