For a while we’ve known that the ambitious plans for the adaptation of David Mitchell’s multi-story novel, Cloud Atlas, would involve the actors playing numerous roles in tales that span from early 19th Century exploration to trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic future.
However the presumption was Tom Hanks would play a white man in any of the tales he’s in, while the likes of Hugo Weaving, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess and Bae Doona would also stick to their own races and genders. However that’s apparently not so, as actor Ben Whishaw has been talking to Vulture and told them, “Everyone in the cast is playing at least three parts, some big and some small. Im doing three: Frobisher in the thirties; a female American in the seventies, in the Luisa Rey section; and a smallish role, where Im basically an extra, in a modern-day nursing home, in the Timothy Cavendish section. Everybodys swapping race and gender, so its very ambitious and quite fun. Ill really love playing a woman!”
Sounds like it’s no wonder many of the actors involved have been very excited by this project and described it as something that could either be a masterpiece or trainwreck, but a fascinating experiment nevertheless. One of the book’s stories takes place in a future dystopian Korea, so it appears as if some of the actors may end up becoming Asian for part of the movie. With the Wachowskis directing (alongside Tom Twyker, with two units running simultaneously, handling different stories), it’ll be interesting to see if the changes of race and gender are handled purely with makeup, or if they’re going to use CGI to try and make it more realistic.
Shooting on Clous Atlas starts this month.