Jenna Ortega Stars in the Klara and the Sun Adaptation

The first trailer for Klara and the Sun has finally shown Jenna Ortega as one of Kazuo Ishiguro’s most unusual narrators. Ortega plays Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend who watches human behaviour with patience, innocence and a faith in the sun that is difficult to separate from religion.

Sony will release the film in theatres on October 23, 2026. Taika Waititi wrote and directed the adaptation, with Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Steve Buscemi, Natasha Lyonne and Aran Murphy joining Ortega.

This is not an obvious role for performance built around big emotion. Klara’s power in the novel comes from observation and restraint. That makes Ortega’s casting interesting, but the harder question belongs to the adaptation itself. How do you turn a quiet artificial mind into a film without explaining away everything that makes it strange?

🤖 What the trailer reveals

Klara begins in a store where Artificial Friends wait to be chosen. She studies people through the window and hopes to find a home. The trailer keeps the basic movement of the novel. Klara is selected for Josie, a teenage girl living with a serious illness, and enters a family shaped by fear about what may happen next.

The film presents Klara as an older model in a world where artificial companions are becoming less fashionable. Natasha Lyonne plays the store manager. Amy Adams plays Josie’s mother, and Mia Tharia plays Josie.

Klara learns from the family while developing a fierce commitment to helping Josie. Her belief that sunlight may hold a healing power gives the story its odd mixture of science fiction and devotion. The trailer makes that belief central rather than treating it as a small character detail.

Jenna Ortega as Klara A solar-powered Artificial Friend who understands people through careful observation rather than ordinary human instinct.

Mia Tharia as Josie The ill teenager who chooses Klara and gives the Artificial Friend a purpose beyond waiting in the store.

Amy Adams as the mother A parent making difficult choices while trying to protect her daughter from an uncertain future.

Taika Waititi behind the camera The adaptation is written and directed by Waititi, which means tone will be one of the most watched parts of the film.

📖 Why the novel is hard to adapt

Ishiguro tells the story through Klara’s limited point of view. She sees patterns, divides crowded scenes into visual boxes and misunderstands parts of human behaviour. Readers slowly learn the world through what she notices and what she cannot fully explain.

Film can show the same rooms, but a camera does not automatically give us Klara’s mind. The adaptation must decide how much of her thinking becomes dialogue, how much appears through Ortega’s performance and how much remains unexplained.

The danger is overstatement. Klara and the Sun is emotional because Klara does not always name the emotion correctly. If the film explains every symbol and every family secret, it may become easier to follow but less affecting.

☀️ The meaning of the sun

Klara depends on solar energy, but the sun means more to her than power. She treats it as a source of goodness and eventually as something capable of exchange. Her faith is logical inside the limits of her experience, even when a human reader sees how uncertain it is.

That idea gives the story a spiritual shape without turning it into a simple religious allegory. Klara observes that sunlight appears to restore life and mood. She builds a belief from evidence, hope and desperation.

The trailer places this relationship with the sun in clear view. That is encouraging because removing it would turn Klara into a standard robot companion. Her faith is what makes the novel stranger and sadder.

🎭 Why Jenna Ortega may fit the role

Ortega is strongly associated with controlled expressions and characters who do not reveal everything they feel. That can work for Klara. The role needs attention more than obvious warmth.

At the same time, Klara is not cold. She is curious, hopeful and ready to sacrifice more than the humans around her may understand. Ortega will need to make those qualities visible without making Klara seem fully human too early.

Honestly, I was less interested in whether Ortega looked like the Klara I imagined and more interested in whether the trailer allowed her to be still. It does. The performance appears built around watching before speaking, which is the right starting point.

🎬 What readers will be watching for

Book readers will pay close attention to the film’s treatment of Josie’s illness, the social division around lifted children and the plan that places Klara’s identity under pressure. Those elements carry some of the novel’s hardest questions about replacement and love.

They will also watch the tone. Waititi is known for humour, while Ishiguro’s novel is quiet and controlled. A little humour belongs in Klara’s observations. Too much could weaken the unease.

The film opens exclusively in theatres on October 23. Until then, the trailer has done the most useful thing an adaptation trailer can do. It has made the central question visible without answering it. Can an artificial friend understand love more clearly than the people who created her?

🔎 Sources used for this article