Queensland product Margot Robbie will team up with top talent from her home state and beyond for a TV project whose details have just been revealed.

Margot Robbie just revealed what really goes on behind the scenes at the Logies – on one of America’s biggest talk shows.

A team of high-profile Australian women, including Leah Purcell and Rachel Ward, have signed on to write and direct an anticipated Shakespearean television series co-produced by Margot Robbie.

The series, called Shakespeare Now, is being produced by Robbie’s Lucky Chap team and Brisbane’s Hoodlum Entertainment for the ABC, and will see the female creators each recreate one of 10 Shakespeare classics through a modern female lens.

New details about the series, which was first announced in early 2018, were revealed today when it received story development funding from Screen Australia.

Shakespeare Now will screen as an anthology of 10 adaptations of the Bard’s works, including Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Macbeth, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, with the goal to begin production in Australia next year.

As well as Ward, who directed Palm Beach, and Wentworth’s Purcell, other women who will each create an episode include Brisbane’s Michelle Law, Five Bedrooms’ Corrie Chen, and Sarah Scheller of The Letdown.

Hoodlum executive producer Kerrin McNeil said the teams at Lucky Chap, Hoodlum and the ABC had spent two years gathering the creative teams and developing the stories before landing the crucial funding from Screen Australia.

“We left it open to the creatives to come to us, connecting with the play they most wanted to explore, obviously it’s a complete recreation through a female lens,” McNeil told The Courier-Mail.

“They are all Australian and they are all women. That’s one of the things we are most proud of.

“There are some who have significant experience and others who are just starting their journey, but they are all incredibly talented.”

McNeil said it was fantastic to have someone of Robbie’s profile involved in the project, adding: “Margot and her producing team are amazing partners.”

They are currently writing all 10 scripts, and while there is no set date or location for filming, McNeil said Hoodlum – which also produces Harrow, Tidelands and Five Bedrooms – would always push to film their productions in Queensland, where they are based.

She said the series would be quintessentially Australia, but they also hoped to sell it to global audiences.

Shakespeare Now was announced as among the 14 feature films, eight online projects and 20 television dramas that will share in $1.6 million in Screen Australia funding, which also included Toni Collette’s directorial debut with feature film, The Best Of.

“While this has been a turbulent, challenging time for many in the industry, it hasn’t stopped the drive, passion and imagination of Australian creative teams,” Screen Australia head of development Nerida Moore said.

“In fact, we have continued to see applications coming through with really strong and distinctive content, with the application numbers across March-June this year up 76 per cent on the same period last year.

“It’s exciting to see re-imaginings of well-loved stories such as Shakespeare Now.”

The other women signed on to create Shakespeare Now are Anya Beyersdorf (It’s Me), Lucy Coleman (Hot Mess), Elissa Down (Feel the Beat), Anchuli Felicia King (play White Pearl), Claire McCarthy (The Luminaries), Elise McCredie (Stateless), Amelia Roper (The Great), Nadine von Cohen and Vivienne Walshe (Everything’s Gonna Be OK).

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