Here’s the latest casting news coming out of Cannes and Hollywood…
It looks like Emile Hirsch has bagged himself a new role, playing a soldier in Tangier. The film will the directed by Sean Gullette, the star and co-writer of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, with Darren repaying the favour by producing Tangier, which is about a young AWOL soldier (Hirsch) who jumps ship in Tangiers and is hired to look after a wealthy socialite whose husband appears to be involved in terrifying espionage. The film will also star Kristen Scott Thomas, Jeremy Irons and Tony Shalhoub. However Tangier lacks funding at the moment, with the producers currently in Cannes drumming up interest. (Source: Playlist Nation)
Although Penelope Cruz jumped ship to make Pirates 4 and got replaced by Kirsten Dunst, Lars Von Trier is certainly lining up an interesting cast for his psychological disaster movie, Melancholia. Onboard are Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Kiefer Sutherland, Udo Kier, and Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard, and now John Hurt’s been added to the list. Although the plot is still being kept under wraps, Peter A. Jensen, head of von Trier’s production firm, Zentropa, has let it be known it’s a “beautiful film about the end of the world,” and involves a “large object from outer space approaching Earth”. (Source: THR)
One of the first volleys in Taylor Lautner’s post-New Moon attempt to take over the Earth was attaching himself to the thriller Abduction. However while the movie is being fast-tracked, with production expected to start in the next few months, so far the only other cast member we’ve heard about is Lily Collins. Until now that it, as reports have emerged that Alfred Molina has joined the film. Abduction is about a young man (Lautner) who has long felt disconnected from his parents and then discovers his own baby pictures on a missing person’s website. This unleashes a chain of violent events, with Nathan and his girlfriend (Collins) going on the run, to try and work out why he was kidnapped as a child. Molina will play a dogged CIA agent who is one step behind Lautner but determined to bring him in alive. John Singleton will direct. (Source: Deadline)
Octavia Spencer has joined the cast of The Help, an adaptation of Kathryn Stockette’s novel, which is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, and explores how the unspoken code of behaviour governing Southern households is shattered when an aspiring writer interviews a maid, who speaks candidly about her experiences. Emma Stone will play the interviewer and Viola Davis one of the interviewees, while Bryce Dallas Howard will be a villainous white woman. Spencer’s role, as another of the maids called Minny, was a bit of a no-brainer, as she’s a childhood friend of Stockette and apparently inspired the character in the book. Although not a well-known name, Spencer has been great in everything from Bad Santa and Ugly Betty to Seven Pounds and Drag Me To Hell. (Source: EW)
Channing Tatum first got noticed for his excellent turn in Fighting, but since then the roles he’s taken have made it easy to forget he can actually be a pretty good actor. However now he’s heading back to a more dramatic role in What’s Left Of Us, based on a true story of a man going through a seven day hell of heroin addiction detox. The film is being adapted by Richie Farell from his own novel, based on his life as a junkie and the diffculty he had kicking the addiction. (Source: Screen International)
Lindsay Lohan is set to star in Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura’s (Midnight Meat Train) English-language pic, Black Friday 3D. The movie is set after a couple is visciously murdered, and sees a brother and sister heading off to find the culprit, only to come up against an infamous serial killer. Lohan may be a well-known wild child, but she’s desparately trying to claw back her career, and seems to think this might help. (Source: Bloody Digusting)