With Cannes in full swing and Hollywood still rolling along, there’s been a veritable flood of casting news, so here’s the latest…
Ralph Fiennes, who’s currently busy working on his directorial debut, Coriolanus, has signed on to appear in Coronet, alongwide Quantum Of Solace’s Olga Kurylenko. Storyboard artist Temple Clark will write and direct the movie, which is about Guy (Fiennes), an English graphic designer working in Prague, who begins an affair with his cleaner Maryska (Kurylenko). (Source: THR)
Zoe Saldana, who’s had quite a career rise thanks to Star Trek and Avatar, has jumped onboard the Luc Besson produced drama, Columbiana, which Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3) will direct. Saldana will play a young woman who, after witnessing her parents’ murder as a child, grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. She works for her uncle as a hitman by day, but her personal time is spent engaging in vigilante murders that she hopes will lead her to her ultimate target: the mobster responsible for her parents’ death. Shooting is expected to begin in the late summer. (Source: THR)
Paul Dano, Clancy Brown and Keith Carradine have joined the cast of Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, about a lone gunslinger (Daniel Craig), who is the only hope for a small town after it gets attacked by aliens that are intent on abducting the population. Dano and Brown are both set to play cowboys, with Carradine as the town’s sherriff. Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde will also star in the film, which is set for release July 2nd, 2011. (Source: Deadline)
After Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball was cancelled days before production was due to begin last year, they’ve been busy re-writing it and finding a new director so they can get the Brad Pitt starring movie made, but without Soderbergh’s more indiosyncratic ideas. Jonah Hill has already come on board to play a maths whizz who helped create a statistical system that turned the Oakland As baseball team into winners for very little money. Now it appears Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Wright are in talks for the movie, which would reunite Hoffman with Capote director Bennett Miller. The Oscar-winner actor will play the team manger, who often clashed with general manager Bill Beane (Pitt). Shooting is due to begin in July. (Source: Variety)
Hillary Swank has joined the cast of Dreams Of A Dying Heart, writer/director Shawn Lawrence Otto’s film about a solider (Swank) who struggles to cope with civilian life after suriving a combat chopper crash while on duty in Iraq. She experiences ghostly visions that result in a fight for both her own and her daughter’s life. (Source: Variety)
Anthony Hopkins and Dustin Hoffman are teaming up for The Song Of Names, written by Jeffrey Caines (The Constant Gerdener) and directed by Vadim Perelman (House Of Sand And Fog). Based on the novel by orman Lebrecht, it is the story of two Jewish boys, British Martin and Polish refugee and violin prodigy Dovidl. Dovidl vanishes on the eve of his international debut. 40 years later, Martin gets his first clue about what happened to him and begins to unravel the mystery. (Source: THR)
Christopher Walken has joined the movie Wild Oats, starring alongside the already announced Shirley MacLaine, Maria Bello, Christina Ricci, John Corbett and Bill Pullman. The film is about about a widow who heads to Las Vegas with her granddaughter after she unexpectedly comes into some money (which isn’t really hers to spend). Shooting on Scott Marshall’s film is due to start in August. (Source: THR)
Adrien Brody is set to star in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris. He joins an already impressive cast that includes Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Nina Arianda and Tom Hiddleston. Unusually for an Woody movie, we already know a bit about it, as it’ll centre on a family travelling to Paris for business, with a young engaged couple forced to confront the illusion that a life different from their own is better. (Source: THR)
Jessica Biel will appear in The Tall Man, French director Pascal Laugier’s (Martyrs) English-language debut. Described as being ‘a suspenseful thriller in the vein of the early films of M. Night Shyamalan’, Biel plays a woman who must grapple with and track a mysterious figure known as The Tall Man, who has kidnapped her child. (Source: Screen International)
Ethan Hawke will star in and produce The Numbers Station, about a disgraced black-ops agent, shoved into a dead-end job protecting a 20-year-old woman in the Nevada desert. Inevitably though, they come under attack and must fight to survive. The $10 million movie will be directed by Kasper Barfoed (The Candidate) and should start shooting in September. (Source: Variety)
Lake Bell and Guy Brannum have joined Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman in Ivan Reitman’s currently untitled movie, which was previously known as Friends With Benefits. The movie, about two friends (Kutcher and Portman) who find it’s more difficult to bring sex without emotion into their relationship than they expected, will see Bell as Kutcher’s co-worker, while Brannum’s role is currently unspecified. (Source: Variety)
Matthew Goode, Bojana Novakovic, Rachel Griffiths, Essie Davis, Kerry Fox, Kate Beahan and Gia Carides, have all signed on to star in writer/director Jonathan Teplitzky’s Burning Man. Goode plays Tom, an English chef with a chic restaurant on Bondi Beach trying to put his life and his relationship with his son back on track while surrounded by women. Yep, sounds like he’s got a tough life. (Source: THR)