With it being nearly four years since Steve McQueen‘s last drama, the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, production is finally coming together on his follow-up, an adaptation of the crime drama Widows, based on the British television series. Co-scripted with Gone Girl‘s Gillian Flynn, the cast already includes Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, and André Holland, and now a few more actors have joined.
Following four widows who come together to finish a robbery after their crooked husbands are killed on the job, Fast and the Furious‘ Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Great Gatsby) have now rounded out the main cast. Intriguingly, Joe Walker, who has edited all of McQueen’s films thus far, has said he won’t be re-teaming with the director this time around, so perhaps we can expect a different feel for this genre outing. [Variety/Deadline]
Next up, after his latest film The Sea of Trees was received with mild hatred, to put it lightly, Gus Van Sant is back with Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (which, despite its title’s suggestion, is not a western revenge thriller). Already starring Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, as well as Rooney Mara and Jonah Hill, Variety now reports that Jack Black is also in talks to join the ensemble for the biopic about John Callahan, a quadriplegic cartoonist. There’s no telling yet who Black will play, but with Van Sant developing this project for many years, we’re greatly intrigued to see the results. Check out the Amazon synopsis of the novel below.
Is it possible to find humor — corrosive, taboo-shattering, laugh-till-you-cry humor — in the story of a 38-year-old- cartoonist who’s both a quadriplegic and a recovering alcoholic? The answer is yes, if the cartoonist is John Callahan — whose infamous work has graced the pages of Omni, Penthouse, and The New Yorker — and if he’s telling it in his own words and pictures. But Callahan’s uncensored account of his troubled — and sometimes impossible — life is also genuinely inspiring. Without self-pity or self-righteousness, this liberating book tells us how a quadriplegic with a healthy libido has sex, what it’s like to live in the exitless maze of the welfare system, where a cartoonist finds his comedy, and how a man with no reason to believe in anything discovers his own brand of faith.