What is Casting Couch? It’s a casting roundup that’s knee deep in nostalgia as it reports on movies based on comic books and toys from its childhood.
Due to a little bit of inspiration from the Internet, Michael Bay gave Mark Wahlberg a pretty big part in his upcoming fourth Transformers movie. It’s always been understood that Wahlberg was playing a placeholder character though, who would pass the franchise off to a couple of young kids who would be pushed into the forefront as it went forward. Well, today Bay announced that he’s found the male half of this new duo. Apparently little known Irish actor Jack Reynor is his guy. Bay says that he saw Reynor in an Irish movie called What Richard Did, which a quick Googling tells me has nothing to do with acting opposite giant robots, so let’s all hope he knows what he’s talking about.
Christopher Meloni
As Robert Rodriguez’s latest Frank Miller adaptation, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, gears up for production, its cast is starting to become more clear. Just yesterday we learned that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has signed up as a character named Johnny, and today the news comes that Law and Order: SVU actor Christopher Meloni is one of the latest names to join the cast. According to Deadline, he’ll be playing a cop, which in the world of Sin City means that he’s probably going to be corrupt and evil. This is good news, because despite any of the rumors out there that Meloni is the type of guy who likes to fondle his sweaters, he’s proven over and over again that he’s an actor who can pull off creepy and evil.
Josh Brolin
In Rodriguez’s original Sin City, Clive Owen played the character of Dwight, a dude who has extensive plastic surgery over the course of Miller’s intertwining noir stories. Seeing as Dwight is supposed to look completely different in the story being told in A Dame to Kill For than he did in the original film, it was going to make sense that he would have to be played by another actor, and not Owen. Well, today Dimension Pictures announced that Rodriguez has found his man, and his man is Josh Brolin. Seeing as we just saw Brolin do an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impersonation in the most recent Men in Black movie, it will be interesting to see if he tries to throw a little of Owen’s mannerisms into his portrayal of Dwight. Maybe this guy has a potential career as an impressionist that he’s never explored.
Zoe Bell
First-time writer/director Justin Daly is getting ready to make Douglas Brown, a movie set in old-time Hollywood that was inspired by discussions he had with his grandmother, Ingrid Bergman. The film is about a reclusive actor who hires a private detective to get him out of a jam after someone attempts to blackmail him and, according to Indiewire, it’s going to star two actors who have both seen great success when working with another lover of Hollywood history, Quentin Tarantino. Jackie Brown’s Robert Forster and Death Proof’s Zoe Bell are said to be starring, alongside a bevy of other actors like James McCaffrey, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Bill Sage, and Dan Hedeya. This is good news, because Forster didn’t experience nearly as big of a second career wind after Jackie Brown as he should have. He’s just so great. He should be in every movie.
Will Forte
In an adorable bit of happenstance, that not-quite-a-Jackie-Brown-sequel, The Switch, that Dan Schechter is making is switching up a couple of its cast members. According to Variety, Ty Burrell and Dennis Quaid have dropped out of the film, and Will Forte and Tim Robbins have signed on to take their places. They’ll now be joining John Hawkes and Mos Def, who are playing the same characters that Robert De Niro and Samuel L. Jackson did in Tarantino’s film, which was an adaptation of a different James Elroy novel that featured several of the same characters as this one. As much as I appreciate Robbins’ work in The Hudsucker Proxy, I gotta say that he and Forte look like a downgrade compared to Burrell and Quaid. What do you think?