What is Casting Couch? It’s a handy one-stop source for all the casting news that broke while you were sleeping in over the weekend.
Not only are Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart two of the most hilarious comic actors working today, they’re also two of the most famous funny people on the planet. So the fact that they’re going to be teaming up for a new comedy from Key & Peele showrunners Ian Roberts and Jay Martel is potentially big news.
The pitch they’ll be working from, which Deadline says Warner Bros. is currently negotiating to acquire, is for a film called Get Hard, which will cast Ferrell as a yuppie investment banker who gets sentenced to a maximum security prison, and Hart as the streetwise guy he hires to teach him how to handle life on the inside before he has to report in 30 days. Montage fans should take note, because it sounds like this is the sort of movie that’s going to have a lot of them.
Kristen Stewart
Also confirmed by Deadline is the news that Kristen Stewart is going to be starring opposite Ben Affleck in a romantic comedy. The film is called Focus, and it comes from Crazy, Stupid, Love’s writing and directing team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Focus is apparently about a veteran con man who takes a fledgling con woman under his wing and shows her the ropes, which then leads to romance, which then leads to weirdness because con artists are liars.
When Deadline first talked about Affleck taking this role they said Ficarra and Requa originally wrote the film to re-pair Crazy, Stupid, Love’s Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, which would have been… so much better than this. Do Affleck and Stewart have it in them to create an even less appealing to the public romantic pairing than Affleck and Jennifer Lopez did in Gigli? It looks like we’re going to find out.
Ty Burrell
Remember when Christoph Waltz was going to play an Interpol inspector in the Muppets sequel, which is set up to be a globe-hopping caper film? That was a fun thought, but it turns out it isn’t going to happen.
Waltz has ended up having scheduling issues, and is being forced to drop out of the film. The news here isn’t completely terrible though, because THR is reporting that director James Bobin has already cast Modern Family’s Ty Burrell as his replacement. Sure, going from Waltz to anybody is going to be something of a disappointment, but Burrell is consistently the MVP of the talented ensemble cast of his TV show, so it should be interesting to see what he’s able to produce when given a big role in a big movie. This could mark the beginnings of a whole new stage in the guy’s career. A new stage where his co-stars are made out of felt.
Martin Sheen
Leave it to a source like Comic Book Movie to go as far as to scour late night Irish television for scoops involving an upcoming superhero property. While watching Martin Sheen on RTE Television’s version of The Late Late Show, they heard veteran actor Martin Sheen give confirmation that he’s going to be coming back and doing more stuff for Marc Webb’s upcoming Amazing Spider-Man sequel.
Sheen said, “They’ve called me back, I don’t know what the part is gonna be, but I’m going to be Uncle Ben once again in Spider-Man next year. We shoot it in February.” This may sound strange, seeing as Uncle Ben is dead, but Peter Parker is flashing back to lessons that his uncle taught him all the time. Probably this won’t amount to much more than a fantasy sequence cameo that comes when Spidey needs just the right bit of motivation to keep him going. Or maybe we’ll finally get to see Zombie Uncle Ben!
Glenn Close
THR has a report that Glenn Close and Nick Nolte are all set to team together on a film from Rock of Ages creator Chris D’Arienzo. This time around he’s written and is set to direct a film called Always On My Mind, which will cast Nolte as an aging rock star who is beginning to succumb to Alzheimer’s and Close as his wife, who is left to pick up the pieces of his frivolously lived life. This one is being described as a “music-driven drama,” which calls up images of it being some sort of cross between Rock of Ages and Michael Haneke’s Amour, which is a concept weird enough to make your brain dissolve and trickle out of your ear.
As if the possibility of watching Nolte play a character with Alzheimer’s wouldn’t have been potentially uncomfortable enough already, now we have to imagine him also doing some singing in the process. The horror, the horror…