With Dark Shadows, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s adaptations of the 1960s supernatural soap opera, set to start shooting soon, the director is busy assembling his cast. Eva Gree, Bella Hathcote and Jackie Earle Haley were recently cast, and now it looks like Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter join the throng.
Depp is heading the cast as 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.
THR reports that Pfeiffer is in talks to join the movie, which would be her first collaboration with Burton since Batman Returns. She would play Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the reclusive matriarch of the Collins family. Deadline has the Bonham-Carter news, but then, she’s in pretty much everything Burton does, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. She’d play Hoffman, a specialist in psychology and rare blood disorders who moves into Collinwood, where the film is set. While she initially is a threat to the vampire Barnabas, she eventually becomes his ally, and may be able to cure him of his thirst for blood.