Ron Howard is pulling together a pretty good cast for In The Heart Of The Sea, his planned movie based on the story that inspired Moby Dick. Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson are already onboard, and now TheWrap reports that Ben Whishaw and Frank Dillane are also likely to sign up.
Charles Leavitt wrote the script, adapted from Nathanial Philbrick’s non-fiction book of the same name. The story revolves around a Nantucket whaling ship that was destroyed by a sperm whale in 1820. Only eight crew members were rescued alive, after being lost at sea for 90 days – by which point they’d turned to cannibalism. Benjamin Walker will play first-time Captain, Pollard, with Hemsworth as his first mate, Owen Chase, and Murphy as the second mate.
Whishaw is in talks to play Herman Melville, who it appears will be part of a framing device, where Brendan Gleeson plays one of the aging survivors of the whaling disaster, who tells Herman what happened to them.
Dillane, who’s best known for play the young Voldemort in Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince, is set to play Coffin, an insubordinate crew member who’s also the cousin of Walker’s George Pollard.
The hope is to shoot the movie this September in order to fit the film into Hemsworth’s busy schedule.