Director Lauren Wolkstein Joins ‘Life Is Strange’ TV Series at Amazon

As we are getting close to the production start date, new developments are coming as Amazon's upcoming video game adaptation has added its second director to the list. ‘Life Is Strange’ TV Series has added Lauren Wolkstein as a new director after Karyn Kusama was tapped earlier.

Lauren Wolkstein is known for directing recently released shows like 56 Days, The Walking Dead: Dead City, and the upcoming show, Ride or Die. Lauren Wolkstein directed the 2017 drama-thriller The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff and served on the directorial team for the third season of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar, which she followed with a Producing Director role in the fifth season. Wolkstein has directed a few other Prime Video shows, and her credits include The Bondsman, Dead Ringers, Y: The Last Man, and Cloak & Dagger.

As previously announced,  the series is set to kick off filming on June 29, 2026, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and will wrap up on October 16, 2026. In the series, Max (Tatum Grace Hopkins), a photography student, discovers she can reverse time and save her childhood best friend, Chloe (Maisy Stella). As she attempts to grasp this new power, the team investigates a mysterious disappearance of a fellow student, revealing a dark side to their community that will eventually drive them to make an impossible life-or-death decision that will permanently change their lives.

The series is adapted from a critically acclaimed episodic video game of the same name. It centers on Max Caulfield, an 18-year-old photography student who suddenly discovers she possesses the extraordinary ability to rewind time at will. This power lets her step back a few moments in any situation to alter outcomes—yet every decision she makes ripples outward in unpredictable ways, embodying the classic “butterfly effect,” where even the smallest change can dramatically reshape the future. Armed with her new gift, Max sets out to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rachel Amber, a fellow student whose vanishing has left the community reeling. As she digs deeper, she becomes entangled in a string of bizarre and increasingly tragic events that seem to target the young women at her academy, forcing her to confront dark secrets, fractured friendships, and the heavy moral weight of playing with time itself.

The live-action series adaptation of Life Is Strange is being written by Charlie Covell, who is also serving as executive producer and showrunner. Joining him as executive producers are Dmitri M. Johnson, Michael Lawrence Goldberg, and Timothy I. Stevenson, along with Jen Roskind and Karyn Kusama. The project is a collaboration between Square Enix, Story Kitchen, and LuckyChap, with Amazon MGM Studios producing. Life Is Strange is likely to release sometime in 2027 on Prime Video.