Let’s hope this didn’t happen because Danny Boyle watched X-Men: First Class and decided the other main actor in the movie, who he hadn’t chosen for his next film, was better. Whatever the reason, Variety says the previously announced Michael Fassbender is out of Boyle’s Trance, and his First Class co-star James McAvoy is in.
Fassbender passed on the project for unknown reason, giving McAvoy the chance to slip into this remake of a 2003 British movie directed by Joe Ahearne, which centres on an art heist. An assistant at an auction house masterminds the heist and teams up with a gang of thieves, but suffers a blow to the head and wakes up with amnesia. He is the only one who knows where the paintings location is and after his continued failure to remember, the gang begins to suspect duplicity on his part and hire a female hypnotist to get into his brain. McAvoy would play the shady leader of the gang who partners with the assistant (although he’d initially appear better for the amnesiac, he could be pretty good playing against type).
As previously reported, Boyle plans to direct the movie this autumn, then go full time putting together the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, before going back to Trance one that’s complete, editing it together for release early in 2013.