‘Prima Facie’ Trailer: Cynthia Erivo Stars in Stage-to-Screen Drama

Sony Pictures has released the official trailer for Prima Facie, the screen adaptation of Suzie Miller’s hit stage play starring Cynthia Erivo as a high-powered barrister whose career and private life fracture after she is sexually assaulted by someone inside her professional circle, Deadline reported Tuesday. The film, directed by Susanna White, world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is scheduled to open theatrically in the United Kingdom and Ireland on November 13, with US distribution still to be announced.

Erivo’s Tessa is introduced as a sharp young advocate known for defending men charged with sexual assault. The trailer turns that reputation against her when she becomes the complainant, forcing her to navigate the same system she once trusted as both a career foundation and an identity. Deadline noted that seeking justice carries extra weight because of her courtroom record, and that the ordeal shakes her faith in the legal machinery that defined her.

Playbill confirmed the first trailer drop and situated the film in the play’s Broadway and West End lineage. Jodie Comer originated the solo stage role, winning Olivier and Tony Awards for performances that made Miller’s text a global talking point about consent, credibility, and institutional blind spots. Miller adapted her own play for the screen; White, whose credits include Andor and Nightsleeper-era prestige television and features, expands the world beyond a one-person showcase.

Playbill listed supporting players including Daniel Ings, Toheeb Jimoh, and Noma Dumezweni, underscoring how the film version builds an ensemble around Erivo rather than remaining a solo-stage transfer. Sales are being co-repped by UTA Independent Film Group and CAA Media Finance while a US release date remains open, Deadline reported. An Australian theatrical date of January 14, 2027, has circulated in related coverage as distributors sequence English-language markets after the UK/Ireland bow. That staggered rollout gives Sony room to gauge UK box office and awards chatter before locking a North American plan, a common path for stage-to-screen dramas that depend on performance-driven word of mouth rather than franchise preawareness.

Speaking to Deadline’s TIFF studio, Erivo said she was drawn to the script’s “grey area” and to Tessa as a complex figure rather than a straightforward hero. She had a hand in the law… and that that law then was dealt upon her,” Erivo said, describing the role as a challenge she wanted to meet. The trailer leans into that tension: courtroom fluency, personal devastation, and a justice process that looks different from the defense table than from the witness stand.

Miller has long framed the play through her earlier life as a law student and human rights lawyer. Playbill has previously quoted her on the lasting shock of seeing how race, gender, and class shape outcomes before the law—“once you see the endemic unfairness, you cant not see it anymore. The film trailer keeps that theme in commercial packaging: prestige casting, awards-season timing in the UK, and a subject that has driven both sold-out theater runs and cultural debate.

For Hollywood watchers, Tuesday’s drop also marks another high-profile post-Wicked showcase for Erivo as she moves between musical blockbuster visibility and dramatic lead work. White’s involvement signals a director comfortable with intimate performance and institutional pressure, while Sony’s UK release date places the film in a crowded late-year awards corridor opposite other studio prestige titles.

Festival audiences at TIFF already sampled the finished cut before the trailer went wide, giving the marketing team quotes and social clips to feed into the UK campaign. That sequence — festival premiere, trailer, then November theatrical — mirrors how several awards-minded dramas have tried to convert critical heat into opening-weekend awareness without waiting for a US date. For Erivo, the timing also keeps her in the conversation between large-scale musical visibility and smaller, dialogue-driven roles that courts notice differently.

As buyers circle US rights and audiences sample the trailer, the core pitch remains intact from stage to screen: a lawyer who believed in the system is forced to live inside it as a survivor. Whether that translates into awards traction will depend on Erivo’s performance, White’s expansion of the play’s architecture, and how distributors position a difficult subject for mainstream theatrical audiences this fall and into early 2027.