Russell Crowe has two new co-stars coming his way in the supernatural thriller, The Pope’s Exorcist. According to Deadline, the Oscar-winning actor will be joined by Alex Essoe (Midnight Mass) and Daniel Zovatto (Station Eleven) in the Julius Avery-helmed spooky feature.
The Pope’s Exorcist will pull its plot from the real life events written about in Father Gabriele Amorth’s memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories. Throughout his decades-long career in the religious world, Father Amorth would perform thousands of exorcisms, and ended up with stories that he knew needed to be jotted down before his death. Sadly, the priest passed away in 2016, but not before he completed his desired task.
He was so good at his job, that he became the official exorcist for the diocese of Rome and was even given the title of the Vatican’s Chief Exorcist. Fun fact - the Father once said that his favorite movie was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist as he believed it to be factual albeit with some over-the-top effects. As of right now, we know that Crowe will be stepping into the role of the demon dispelling member of the church, with no news as to who Essoe and Zovatto will be playing.
While things are just beginning to move forward on the production, this has been one that Screen Gems has had in the works for a number of years. After acquiring Father Amorth’s life rights as well as the rights to his memoirs, the production company put their plan into motion with Ángel Gómez initially tapped to direct. The most recent draft of the screenplay comes from Evan Spiliotopoulos with editing and revisions penned by Chuck Maclean.
Both Essoe and Zovatto are no strangers to the supernatural horror genre, giving them each a solid background to step into the exorcism based film. For Essoe, she starred in the Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass as well as in the director’s feature length telling of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, which was a followup story to The Shining. Next up, Essoe will appear in Ariel Vida’s thriller Trim Season. As for Avery, he's had his hands full with a slew of projects over the past several years including the 2018 history meets zombie flick, Overlord, which starred Joseph Quinn and the Ewan McGregor starring 2014 thriller, Son of a Gun. On August 26, the filmmaker will drop his latest project, a vigilante action film starring Sylvester Stallone titled Samaritan.
Zovatto’s most recent project was HBO Max’s Station Eleven where he appeared in the miniseries surrounding a too-close-to-home Earth wiping pandemic plotline. The actor also nabbed a leading role in the one season supernatural series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. On the film side of things, Zovatto has appeared in celebrated horror flick It Follows as well as Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut piece, Lady Bird.
The production team for The Pope’s Exorcist will include 2.0 Entertainment’s Doug Belgrad, Jesus & Mary’s Michael Patrick Kaczmarek, Worldwide Katz’s Jeff Katz, and Eddie Siebert of Loyola Productions. Screen Gems’ Scott Strauss, Michael Bitar, and Giselle Johnson will oversee.
As of right now, The Pope’s Exorcist has not revealed a release date. Check out a trailer for Avery's upcoming action thriller, Samaritan below: