Director Ridley Scott’s Moses epic Exodus is coming together quite nicely.  While Scott has been developing the pic for some time, the project picked up steam earlier this year when Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) turned in a rewrite of the Adam Cooper and Bill Collage script.  Christian Bale was being courted to play Moses in the film, and now it appears that Bale has indeed signed on to play the Biblical character as THR reports that The Great Gatsby star Joel Edgerton is in talks to play the Egyptian ruler Ramses.  Hit the jump for more.

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The folks over at THR report that Edgerton has entered talks to join Scott’s film, which is on track to start production this September in Spain, Morocco, and England in anticipation of the film's recently-announced December 12, 2014 release date.  The Wrap adds that Javier Bardem was offered the Ramses role but subsequently passed.  Exodus is just the kind of big-budget, period epic that Scott has done so well in the past with Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven (the Director’s Cut, that is), and so it’s with great anticipation that the film is finally moving forward.  Scott is also producing the pic alongside Zaillian and Peter Chernin for 20th Century Fox, and this will be his follow-up to the Cormac McCarthy-scripted drama The Counselor, which opens later this year.

It would appear that Bale has settled on Exodus as his next project, marking the first large-scale film for the actor since hanging up the cowl following last year’s The Dark Knight Rises.  In the meantime Bale shot two films for Terrence Malick, director David O. Russell’s 1980s-set American Hustle, and the character-centric drama Out of the Furnace.  Both Hustle and Furnace open in theaters later this year.  As for Edgerton, he was last seen onscreen in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and last year’s drama Zero Dark Thirty, and he recently wrapped the production-troubled Western Jane Got a Gun.  He’s also poised to star in Mud director Jeff Nichols’ sci-fi film Midnight Special.

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