The Demi Moore-fronted narrative podcast Dirty Diana reached its final episode in mid-August, and just over month later, Amazon purchased the series adaptation rights, as reported by Deadline. Moore will reprise her role as the title character in Amazon’s upcoming series and hold the title of executive producer, Deadline reports. Amazon Prime already has an established library of podcast-to-screen adaptations, namely Lore and Homecoming.
Dirty Diana tells the story of Diana, voiced by Moore (Ghost, Mortal Thoughts), who works in the corporate world, but leads covert double life as the host of a website that houses recordings of other women’s erotic confessions. The running thread of Diana’s marital troubles with her husband Oliver, voiced by Claes Bang (The Square, BBC One’s Dracula), is allegedly partially inspired by the real-life experiences of creator Shana Feste (The Greatest, Country Strong), according to an interview Variety conducted with Moore and Feste. Her husband Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Insidious, Destroyer) helped produce the Dirty Diana podcast, and has signed on to be an executive producer on Amazon’s screen adaptation, according to Deadline. When Feste was asked by Variety about how Kavanaugh-Jones responded to the material, she mentioned that working on it was an eye-opening experience for him: “There were definitely times in the episode where Brian was like, ‘Is that what I was really like? Did I sound like that? That feels familiar.’ ” The podcast is written by Feste herself, with the help of Jennifer Besser, an executive producer on Feste’s two most recent feature films, 2018’s Boundaries and the Sundance selection Run Sweetheart Run.
In her interview with Variety, Feste articulated the way that the podcast medium allowed her to play with the storytelling device of implied action: “The fantasy and the sex in your head… allows you to use your imagination, and imagination is powerful thing.” Later in the Variety interview, Moore added that the podcast could be thought of as laying the groundwork for a future audiovisual series: “If it were to go to Amazon… We’ll already be a step ahead in terms of what we might want to do with it.”
Each of the podcast’s six episodes features celebrity voice performances. Some of the actors who can be heard on the Dirty Diana podcast include Betsy Brandt (Breaking Bad, Masters of Sex), Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel, Undone), Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), Carmen Ejogo (Selma, True Detective), Max Greenfield (New Girl, The Neighborhood), Dayo Okeniyi (Shades of Blue, The Hunger Games), Mackenzie Davis (Tully, Black Mirror: San Junipero), and Melanie Griffith (Working Girl, Body Double). There has been no confirmation as of yet regarding the involvement of the aforementioned celebrity cast in Amazon’s Dirty Diana television program, according to Deadline.
All six episodes of the Dirty Diana podcast are available to stream and download via all major podcast platforms.