Dreamworks Studios isn’t wasting any time casting their adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel The Help. The studio confirms it’s in early negotiations with Emma Stone to play the lead character Skeeter Phelan, a white recent college graduate living in the South in the early 1960s.

Stone, best known for her role as spunky older sister Wichita in last year’s unlikely hit Zombieland, could easily embody the spunky character Skeeter, a young woman who is uncomfortable with the current social norms of her Mississippi, where the black maids do all the work and receive none of the respect. She sets out to write a book chronicling the maids’ experiences, a tell-all that uncovers the racism, cruelty and deplorable actions of the white society women, some of whom are her own friends.

Stockett’s childhood friend Tate Taylor has adapted the book and is scheduled to begin filming this summer in Mississippi.

Source: EW