While Lee Daniels’ Civil Rights drama Selma started off with the least-expected casting — Hugh Jackman — the roster has slingshot back to the top spot. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Daniels has picked British actor David Oyelowo to play Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. While Oyelowo does have a decent number of roles to his name — such as Dr. Junju in The Last King of Scotland and Orlando in the sumo-twisted As You Like It (I’m serious — sumo Shakespeare, check it out.) — this will surely be the actor’s chance at a break-away, name-making gig.
Not an all-out King biopic, the film will focus on the historic, 1965 marches in Selma, Alabama, where a march for voting rights turned into a ghastly affair with the local and state police that was dubbed “Bloody Sunday.” Jackman, the first released cast member, will play a racist sheriff. As for the rest of the potential players, that seems to be under wraps. THR’s post suggests the rest of the cast has been picked, as they note: “The part of Alabama Gov. George Wallace remains up for grabs.”
Unfortunately, it seems that Pathe International, the financier, could be scaling back its involvement, so hopefully any money woes get straightened out soon. In the meantime, you can catch Oyelowo in George Lucas’ upcoming Tuskegee Airman feature, Red Tails. For those familiar with Oyelowo’s work, what do you think of this casting?
Filed under: Drama, Casting




Spoilers. Put them behind a jump, add a warning in bright red 2000-style blinking HTML, make the text the same color as the background so the reader has to highlight it to read it… Do whatever you want, but there will always be someone who accidentally reads a spoiler (or, in my case, simply can’t resist them). Publicists, stars, the director, the writer, and most everyone associated with the film works very hard to prevent these sorts of slips (or “slips”), and I don’t blame them.*
I panicked when I saw the Variety headline: “Warners Plans Pic Based on Da Vinci.” Because honestly, if a studio announced a remake of
Just two days ago, I brought you
I have a weird relationship with
“And while in my lifetime I’ve seen science make extraordinary inroads into solving the most complex questions of life, after all this time I admit that I am thrilled that there are some things that forever will remain a mystery. For example, do I wear a toupee?” — William Shatner, Up Till Now: An Autobiography
I completely understand the whirlwinds bred out of love for vampires and werewolves. They’re powerful, they’re mysterious, and they often have a nice amount of lusty machismo to make the young ladies go wild. But wolfy prey? Little red riding hood wolfy prey? While not the sort of theme one would usually expect to get dueling projects, there’s now a feature film and television film about the young wolf victim in the works. It just goes to show you what happens when you mix supernatural passion with the trend to remake old tales.

