Casting Updates: April 1, 2008
Mirren, Plummer, Hillcoat, Bakula and Pressly
There are quite a few casting updates to note today and I felt with all the other articles it is probably best to do them all in one shot. So here goes.
First off, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren are replacing Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep in the Leo Tolstoy biopic The Last Station for director Michael Hoffman. James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti are also cast in the film based on Jay Parini's 1990 novel, exploring the turbulent final year in the life of the Russian writer and philosopher and his troubled marriage.
Giamatti plays Tolstoy's trusted follower Chertkov, a supporter of the writer's nonviolent socialist Christian movement who becomes Sofia's cunning adversary, while McAvoy plays a naive private secretary sent by Chertkov to work for Tolstoy. British actress Anne-Marie Duff, who is married to McAvoy, stars as Tolstoy's daughter Sasha. [Variety]
John Hillcoat previously directed The Proposition and he is currently working on the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and he is already set to follow that one up with Matt Bondurant's upcoming novel "The Wettest County in the World", a story that revolves around a moonshine gang operating in the bootlegging capital of America — Franklin County, Va. — during Prohibition. [Variety]
This one shocks me a bit since I never considered Scott Bakula ("Quantum Leap" and "Enterprise") as a movie star. His acting is second rate, which is perfect for television, but Steven Soderbergh disagrees and who am I to second guess him? Bakula is set to star alongside Matt Damon in Soderbergh's The Informant. The spy-thriller is based on a true story and Bakula will play Brian Shepherd, an FBI agent who exposes an international price-fixing scheme with the help of biochemist Mark Whitacre (Damon). [Variety]
Finally we have Jaime Pressly joining Paul Rudd and Jason Segel in the comedy I Love You, Man for writer/director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly). The film centers on a guy (Rudd) about to be married whose fiancee (Rashida Jones) is calling all her friends to be in the wedding. Realizing he has no friends, he starts to go on man-dates to find a best man; he finds one in Segel. Pressly plays the best friend of the fiancee. [THR]
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