We’ve got a couple of casting stories to share this afternoon. First up, Jennifer Aniston has joined the large cast of director Peter Bogdanovich’s (The Last Picture Show) upcoming film She’s Funny That Way (previously referred to as Squirrels to the Nuts). The film stars Brie Larson as a hooker-turned-Broadway-thesp and follows the recurring intersection between these two facets of her life. Owen Wilson plays a married Broadway director who falls for Larson’s character, and The Wrap reports that Aniston has signed on to play a therapist with a mother in rehab for alcoholism.
Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are producing, and the impressive ensemble cast also includes Jason Schwartzman, Kathryn Hahn, Eugene Levy, and Cybil Shepherd. Production is set to get underway in New York City in June. Hit the jump for casting news regarding Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt’s next film.
Additionally, just days after we learned that Rupert Wyatt had settled on the World War I drama Birdsong as his Rise of the Planet of the Apes follow-up, it appears that the filmmaker has found his leading man. THR reports that Nicholas Hoult is set to star in the pic, which is based on the novel of the same name by Sebastian Faulks. The story spans three generations and centers on a young Englishman who strikes up a love affair with a French woman and then enters the war. Hoult will play said Englishman, and Wyatt described the actor as the “holy grail” in his search to fill the role.
Hoult recently proved his chops at handling the lead with the swell zombie romance film Warm Bodies, and he’ll be seen next month toplining Bryan Singer’s fantasy adventure Jack the Giant Slayer. He’s gearing up to shoot the sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past, but Birdsong will film later this year for a planned fall 2014 release.
Read a synopsis for the book below:
Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come. [Amazon]
