Category: Casting

Waiting for Gadot.

Israeli actress Gal Gadot is cast as Wonder Woman for Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel follow-up (which people have been calling Batman v. Superman, but now seems to be Batman v. Superman v. Wonder Woman v. Lex Luthor v. Doomsday or somesuch.) “Variety adds you can probably expect ‘several members of the Justice League’ to make appearances in the film.”

This seems like a role that Jaimie Alexander was born to play, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve seen more of Gadot — She was apparently in Knight and Day but I have no memory of her.

Tech, Lies, and Videotape.

In a move that should take some of the recent heat off Ben Affleck, Marvel and Joss Whedon cast James Spader as Ultron, the villain of Avengers 2 (presumably in a mo-cap or voiceover capacity.) Erm…ok. Spader’s a solid actor, but I stand by my earlier description of him as the Brundlefly William Shatner — not exactly who first comes to mind to play a crazed robot. (Also, this would seem to quell the persistent rumor that Whedon’s Ultron would be Paul Bettany’s JARVIS gone rogue.)

The Dahk Knight.

So…Ben Affleck. He’s not who I would’ve cast, and it’s hard to see how an Affleck Batman would be any different from his portrayal of Daredevil. But he isn’t the worst choice in the world, I suppose. Affleck’s a decent enough actor most of the time, and, in any case, the poorly written, too 9/11y by half Man of Steel was so flawed that his presence can only help at this point. (It’s too bad Affleck isn’t directing.) Besides, I doubt any iteration of Batman, Affleck or otherwise, would cotton to Supes bringing MoS-level destruction to Gotham City, unless there were cookies involved. (Animated gif via here.)

After the Candelabra.

“The setting: downtown New York in 1900, a tumultuous time of massive change and great progress. The series centers around the groundbreaking surgeons, nurses and staff at Knickerbocker Hospital, who are pushing the bounds of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics.”

Speaking of the Knicks: On the eve of Behind the Candelabra (this Sunday on HBO), Steven Soderbergh — still ostensibly retired from feature filmmaking — is set to direct 10-hours of a period hospital drama, The Knick, for Cinemax, with Clive Owen.

As a hobby, apparently, he’s also gotten into the film cognoscenti hipster t-shirt business. “While designing the shirts, Soderbergh told Reuters, ‘I would test them out by wearing them to the set to see if people knew the movie references.'” Citizen Kane aside, most of them are pretty esoteric. (Second link via The Late Adopter.)

The Air (and Anne) Up There.


In the trailer bin, working class stiff Matt Damon aims to crack open the stately lunar pleasure domes of the 1% in our first look at Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, also with Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, William Fichtner and Wagner Moura. The Damon-in-the-exoskeleton battle scenes do have a distinctly District 9 sensibility about them.

And in related movie news, Anne Hathaway has joined the cast of Chris Nolan’s next, Interstellar, also with Matthew McConaughey. “Interstellar will depict a heroic interstellar voyage to the furthest reaches of our scientific understanding. The movie hits theaters on November 7, 2014.” Between this and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity this October, I’m liking the embrace of ambitious films about space travel of late.

A Star is Grown.

“Every male movie star has a different magic number—an age at which his attractiveness and ability and maturity all come together. Before that, a star may not feel fully formed; after that, if he has talent, he seems to become more assured, complicated, and real with every passing year.”

“Tom Hanks’s ideal age was about 36 — when he made Philadelphia and Forrest Gump…Clooney’s ideal age seems to have been about 45 — the Syriana–Michael Clayton period. He needed the gray hair and extra years because his whole ‘I’ve done things with women you only dream of’ vibe required some visible baggage—creases, texture, a little sag…Tom Cruise is about Clooney’s age; unfortunately, Cruise’s ideal age was about 25 — the Top Gun-Color of Money moment of maximum cocksureness.”

In GQ, Mark Harris surveys the state of the Hollywood Leading Man in 2013. “The dust clears. We survey the landscape. Channing Tatum is now a movie star. And Taylor Kitsch is not. How did this transition, not particularly predictable a year ago, happen for one of them? Why did it fail to happen for the other?”

The Lion and the Mutants.

From facing off against the wolves of the north to battling a Canadian wolverine, word breaks that Peter Dinklage is set to play the villain in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. (That may mean he’s Sentinel creator Bolivar Trask, although the jury’s still out. Note also the Season 3 scar across Tyrion’s face above.)

I get the feeling X:DFP is either going to be amazing or an overstuffed Last Stand-like disaster. Still, it’s yet another testament to just how decisively fanboys have won the culture war when they’re making a movie of one of the most iconic X-Men tales with both casts from the previous films — the McAvoy/Fassbender/Lawrence team of First Class and the Stewart/McKellen/Jackman team of the first three films. An ensemble movie and no mistake.

Update: Even more X-Men: Now Singer is teasing the return of Cyclops and Jean Grey.

Wonder less full.

Sorry y’all: Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper are all left on the cutting room floor of Terence Malick’s To the Wonder, opening soon at the Venice Film Festival. In case you were wondering, that leaves Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem in the story of a “man who reconnects with a woman from his hometown after his marriage to a European woman falls apart.” The economic crisis is also somehow involved, presumably in much the same the dinosaurs were in Tree of Life.

(FWIW, among the men left behind in The Thin Red Line were Viggo Mortensen, Mickey Rourke, Lukas Haas, Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Pullman, Jason Patric, Martin Sheen, Donal Logue, and Randall Duk Kim.)