Mick Jagger Joins Star-Studded ‘Three Incestuous Sisters’ Cast

Mick Jagger is heading back to the big screen — and he’s doing it in serious style. The Rolling Stones frontman has joined the cast of Three Incestuous Sisters, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher’s hotly anticipated gothic drama, touching down on the volcanic island of Stromboli via helicopter earlier this week to begin filming alongside an ensemble that reads like a wish list: Dakota Johnson, Josh O’Connor, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, and Isabella Rossellini.

According to Variety, which confirmed the news through an inside source, Jagger is staying in a villa on the island with a history as cinematic as the film itself — it’s the same place where Isabella Rossellini’s father, director Roberto Rossellini, famously began his scandalous affair with her mother Ingrid Bergman on the set of his 1949 film of the same name. The location alone feels like something out of a gothic novel.

Italian press reports, while unconfirmed, suggest Jagger will play the lighthouse keeper — a character whose death by lightning sets the story’s dark events in motion — with O’Connor playing his son. Johnson, Ronan, and Buckley are believed to be playing the three sisters at the center of the story.

What the Film Is About

Based on Audrey Niffenegger’s 2005 illustrated novel — the same author behind The Time Traveler’s Wife — Three Incestuous Sisters is a gothic melodrama about three isolated sisters, Ophile, Clothilde, and Bettine, who live together in a house by the sea. When the lighthouse keeper is killed in a storm, his son Paris returns to take his place — and two of the sisters fall for him, with only one love returned. What follows, in Niffenegger’s own description, involves “terrible rivalries,” “a peculiar baby,” havoc, revenge, and death. Niffenegger once described it as a “silent film melodrama told in Japanese prints” — a nod to the book’s origins as a limited-edition artist’s work made up of 80 aquatint etchings on Japanese Sakamoto paper, bound in calf leather.

The screenplay was co-written by Rohrwacher and Ottessa Moshfegh, the author behind Eileen. That collaboration alone signals how literary and uncompromising this project is going to be.

For Rohrwacher, this marks her first English-language feature. She’s a two-time Cannes prizewinner — taking home the Grand Prix for The Wonders in 2014 and the Jury Prize for Happy as Lazzaro — and was honored earlier this year with the European Film Academy’s Achievement in World Cinema Award. She’s no stranger to some of this cast, either: O’Connor and Rossellini both starred in her last film, the acclaimed La Chimera (2023), which competed at Cannes and was released in the U.S. by Neon.

Jagger’s Return to Acting

For Jagger, this is a comeback seven years in the making. His last screen role was in Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi’s 2019 noir The Burnt Orange Heresy, where he played a reclusive art collector — a film that premiered at Venice. Before that, his acting career stretches back more than five decades, from his debut in the 1970 outlaw drama Ned Kelly to Nicolas Roeg’s Performance that same year, where he played a decadent, burned-out rock star in what remains one of his most memorable screen moments. He’s also appeared in the sci-fi cult classic Freejack (1992), the WWII drama Bent (1997), and The Man From Elysian Fields (2001), among others.

At 82, returning to a project this ambitious — shooting on a remote volcanic island, surrounded by some of the most acclaimed actors working today — says a lot about where Jagger’s head is at right now.

Principal photography began in April, with ten weeks of shooting planned across Stromboli and Rome. The film is financed and produced by Indian Paintbrush, with Johnson and Ro Donnelly producing through Johnson’s TeaTime Pictures banner, alongside Steven Rales. Rohrwacher is also producing, with Italian company Fandango handling line production.

And if that weren’t enough to keep Jagger busy, the Rolling Stones are also gearing up to release Foreign Tongues on July 10 — their first album since the Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds in 2023. The 14-track record, out via Capitol Records, has already introduced two tracks: lead single “In the Stars” and opening track “Rough and Twisted,” featuring a guest list that includes Robert Smith, Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith.

Between a new Stones album and a gothic art film shooting on a Sicilian volcano, Mick Jagger is having a moment. And honestly? It tracks.