By popular demand, our latest casting update:
- Josh Holloway will join Liam Hemsworth, Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Amber Heard, and more in the thriller Paranoia
- Abigail Breslin will star opposite Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in August: Osage County
Hit the jump for details on both projects.
Hemsworth stars as “a blue-collar guy who is blackmailed by his boss into spying on a rival company” in Paranoia. According to Variety, an FBI agent who investigates the shady corporate dealings, paying particular attention to Hemsworth. Lucas Till, Embeth Davidtz, Julian McMahon, and Richard Dreyfuss co-star. That’s a solid cast, especially with the addition of Holloway, who has surprisingly yet to become the superstar I expected him to be after Lost. But the anticipation is dampened when one sees Robert Luketic (Killers) is directing. Paranoia is scheduled for release on September 27, 2013.
August: Osage County is based on the Tracy Letts play about “the women of a family whose lives have splintered in many directions until a crisis bring them back to their childhood home and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them.” Streep is the pill-popping matriarch; Roberts is her daughter. According to Deadline, Breslin will play the “14-year-old angry and acerbic pot-smoking child” of Roberts’ character. Director John Wells (Company Men) will start shooting the Weinstein Co. production in Oklahoma in the fall. George Clooney and Grant Heslov are producing.
If I could have plucked actresses for three generations of a Hollywood family drama, I would probably choose Streep, Roberts, and Breslin. This kind of story is not usually my cup of tea, but with this cast I am looking forward to August. Here’s the play synopsis:
When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. [Amazon]
