After years of planning, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are finally preparing to make Dark Shadows, their adaptation of the 1960s US supernatual soap opera, and with production due to start in the next few months, they’re now looking for a cast.
Deadline reports that Jackie Earle Haley and Aussie actress Bella Heathcote are now in talks for the movie. Haley would play Willie Loomis, who in the original series was ‘a notorious con artist who comes to Collinwood bent on swindling the reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He winds up living in the mansion and hatches a plan when he observes a portrait of the late Barnabas Collins, who wore some serious bling. Loomis breaks into the mausoleum and pries open Barnabas’ coffin expecting to steal jewelry, he’s given the shock of his life when he’s attacked by the vampire and rendered the servant and whipping boy of the bloodsucker.’ Heathcote meanwhile will be Victoria Winters, the young governess of the Collins estate.
Johnny Depp will play Barnabas Collins, a role he’s been obsessed with since becoming a fan of the series as a child. The original Dark Shadows series followed the Collins family and saw them tromented by all sorts of supernatural goings on, from vampires and werewolves to ghosts and witches. It ran for an impressive 1245 episodes between 1965 and 1971. Last we heard, shooting was going to start in April.