What is Casting Couch? It’s the casting column that’s rounding up all the casting news that fell through the cracks. Today we have some doozies, including word that Paul Walker’s remaking a French film.
The last time Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and director David O. Russell all worked together, the result was Silver Linings Playbook, a movie that currently has them all nominated for Oscars. Rejoice, then, that Jennifer Lawrence has just been added to Russell’s next project—that movie about the sting operation that took down a bunch of congressmen in the 70s that used to be called American Bullshit. According to Deadline, who broke the news of Lawrence’s involvement, she’ll be joining the film in the role of the Christian Bale character’s wife. Oh yeah, maybe that should have been mentioned. Christian Bale is also in this. As well as Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Who’s got room on their shelves for more acting Oscars?
Sam Rockwell
It turns out Sam Rockwell has wanted to make a boxing movie for a long time, or at least that’s what director David M. Rosenthal says. So, seeing as a talent like Sam Rockwell gets what a talent like Sam Rockwell wants, the two are teaming up to make a biopic about a boxer from the ’20s named Billy Miske. What’s interesting about this guy is that he was diagnosed with Bright’s Disease, which is a fatal illness that destroys your kidneys, when he was in his boxing prime, but instead of telling anybody about it, he hid his illness and kept his boxing career going as best he could while his body withered away. The initial reporting of this news, which came from Screen Daily, says that the two are putting the material out to writers now, and they’re looking to get it in production pretty quickly. Is it wrong that, given material that sounds this dramatic, I’m still kind of hoping that whoever writes this thing gives Rockwell’s character an excuse to dance?
Lucas Till
Once upon a time, Bret Easton Ellis was involved in the writing of a film called The Curse of Downer’s Grove, which was about, among other things, a town that had a curse that would kill one high school senior every year. Well, several years later, the movie is still on, except not with the any of the cast that was originally attached. It’s just been announced that the film is now going to be directed by Derick Martini (Lymelife), and it will feature a principal cast made up of Dark Shadows’ Bella Heathcote, X-Men: First Class’s Lucas Till, and Hemlock Grove’s Penelope Mitchell. Production on the film is said to be scheduled to begin in the spring, and more casting announcements are forthcoming. Let’s see how many more cursed young people they can dig up.
Paul Walker
After an initial hiccup where Paul Walker was getting shoved too hard down the public’s throat and they decided to spit him back out, the handsome young actor’s career seems to finally be getting back on track. Not only has new life been breathed into his Fast and the Furious franchise, and not only has he been tapped to star in the reboot of the Hitman franchise, but now Deadline is reporting that he’s been signed to star in a remake of the French film, Banlieue 13, which is going to be called Brick Mansions. This one is about an undercover detective trying to recover a WMD that has been stolen by a drug lord, and it will see Walker co-starring with David Belle, who was the star of the original film and is credited with being the guy who invented parkour. So plan on seeing a lot of scrambling up fences and jumping off of window ledges when you watch this one. Hardcore parkour!