Letitia Wright Set to Play a Real-Life Sister with a Chilling Past in The Silent Twins
Letitia Wright has her sights set on a chilling real-life story of inseparable twins.
The Black Panther star, 26, is set to play one of the twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons in the film The Silent Twins, based on the book of the same name by journalist Marjorie Wallace, according to Deadline. Tamara Lawrance will play one of the other twins.
The Gibbons sisters’ history is curious as the two remained silent for the majority of their lives, choosing to communicate only with each other in their own private language.
While they refused to speak, they did dedicate their childhoods to writing poems, novels and short stories as they dreamed of being published writers.
That all changed when they were found guilty of arson, vandalism and theft as teenagers. The two were sent to a high-security mental health hospital called Broadmoor Hospital in 1981. They stayed there for 11 years.
While at Broadmoor, June and Jennifer were thought to be “deeply disturbed and dangerous” by doctors, according to an NPR report published in May 2015.
“Some days, only one twin would eat, and the next day, the other would indulge as her sister starved,” the outlet reported. “Other times, nurses would find them frozen in the same pose, even though they were locked in cells on opposite ends of the hospital.”
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After a decade at the hospital, the sisters were transferred to a different clinic in Wales. Before their transfer, Jennifer told Wallace, “I’m going to have to die,” the journalist recalled to NPR.
Wallace claimed the twins had “made a pact” that Jennifer had “to die because they said the day they left Broadmoor, the day that they were free from the secure hospital, one of them would have to give up their life to really enable the other one to be free.”
In March 1993, the two were in a car ride on their way to the new clinic when Jennifer “fell into a coma,” Wallace said. “By 6:15 that night, she’d been taken into as a casualty and she was dead.”
Jennifer’s death at the age of 29 still remains a mystery. In 2000, June told The New Yorker, “Juvenile delinquents get two years in prison. We got 12 years of hell because we didn’t speak.”
The Silent Twins is set to start filming in April, according to Deadline.
