What is Casting Couch? Quite simply, it’s a casting news round-up that takes its name from the place where young actors trade their dignity for a shot at fame. Today we learn who had to service Miss Piggy to get a role in her new film.
When everyone thinks of James Foley’s 1992 film adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, they think of a bunch of competitive men trying to tear each other’s throats out to get ahead, they think of Alec Baldwin’s testosterone-filled motivational speeches about how coffee is for closers, and generally they think about a bunch of macho posturing and heartless ambition. So Jason Reitman’s latest live reading of a Hollywood script should be fun, because it re-imagines Glengarry by giving it an all-female cast. Who’s he got? According to Inside Movies, his cast will consist of Robin Wright playing the Al Pacino role, Catherine O’Hara the Jack Lemmon one, Maria Bello the Ed Harris one, Allison Janney the Alan Arkin one, and Mae Whitman the Kevin Spacey one. A replacement for Baldwin has yet to be announced, but I think we can all agree that the dream casting would be Beyoncé. The reading takes place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on February 21.
Unnamed Oscar Winner
It’s not clear exactly how many people are still clamoring for another live action take on the ’90s-era comic book phenomenon “Spawn” now that it’s 2013, but it is clear that at least one person out there is: “Spawn” creator Todd McFarlane. He continues to drop hints about the fact that he has another Spawn movie in the works, this time going as far as to tell MTV that he has an Oscar-winning actor very interested in the title role. According to McFarlane, “Every three weeks he’s on the phone going, ‘Todd, where’s the script? Todd, where’s the script?’ I can’t say who it is.” He also added, “He came out to the office. He gave me his pitch, and I gave him mine. The pitch I gave was that we could do ten of these for the next ten years and he wouldn’t have to be 22 for the rest of his life.” Hmmm…Oscar-winning actor…actively campaigning for a role in a comic book movie…has been trying to pretend like he’s 22 his entire life… Okay, Nic Cage, you can come out from behind the curtain. We know that it’s you.
Kelly Reilly
Kelly Reilly, the flame-haired actress who recently played a pretty convincing drug addict in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, has reportedly just landed her next role. THR is reporting that Reilly, alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, has just joined the cast of Keep the Lights On director Ira Sachs’ latest indie drama, Love is Strange. The two will be playing a Park Slope couple who have their hip little lives overrun with old man stink when circumstances force an elderly uncle to come live with them. The good news is that said uncle is already set to be played by Michael Gambon, and, in addition to that, Alfred Molina is already signed to appear somewhere in the film as well. Don’t movie pitches just instantly sound better when you know they’ve got good actors attached to them?
Til Schweiger
When James Bobin started gearing up to make his The Muppets sequel, cheekily titled The Muppets…Again, there probably weren’t too many people who predicted that he would be looking at Quentin Tarantino’s World War II bloodbath Inglorious Basterds to find names to fill out the human half of his cast, but that seems to be exactly what he’s doing. In addition to Christoph Waltz being one of the big stars of the film, Basterds actor Til Schweiger has told Rundschau Online [via Bleeding Cool] that he’s also going to be involved in Kermit and the gang’s latest adventure. Schweiger was supposed to be taking a year off from making movies, but it turns out you just don’t turn down an offer to tell jokes alongside Fozzie Bear, no matter how sick of siting in a makeup chair you are.