In today’s casting round-up, we have updates on a screenwriter’s directorial debut, another airplane-set thriller, an indie comedy about a man and his genitalia, and a romantic comedy set around a flight attendant.
Angus MacLachlan, the screenwriter of 2005’s beautiful and sweet “Junebug,” is set to make his directorial debut with “Goodbye To All That” and he’s cast a pair of character actors as his leads. Paul Schneider (“Bright Star,” "The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford") and Melanie Lynskey (gaining some heat from her revelatory turn in “Hello I Must Be Going”) topline the ensemble that includes Heather Graham, Ashley Hinshaw (“About Cherry,” “Chronicle”), Anna Camp (“Pitch Perfect,” “The Mindy Project”), Celia Weston (the '70s sitcom “Alice”), and comediennes Amy Sedaris and Heather Lawless. The film, which starts production in North Carolina in a couple of weeks, “focuses on what happens to a man after he is unexpectedly divorced by his wife and forced to create a new life with his daughter in tow.” [Deadline]
Although he was recently unceremoniously dropped by Warner Bros. last week, Joel Silver’s latest producing effort, the Jaume Collet-Serra helmed “Non-Stop,” is still trucking. The Liam Neeson-starring thriller, which casts him as “a worn-out air marshal who must protect the passengers on board an international flight when it is faced with a grave threat,” has added “Red Tails” and “Arbitrage” actor Nate Parker as a passenger who teams up with Neeson. Producing is set to start soon in New York. [Variety]
Someone somewhere is still convinced that Cam Gigandet has charisma and the “Twilight” actor has joined “Johnson” alongside comedian Nick Thune. The “raunchy indie comedy” centers on Gigandet as “a charismatic womanizer who receives his comeuppance after his penis mysteriously leaves his body and takes human form,” which will be played by Thune. The rest of the film will, predictably, deal with Gigandet learning how to become a better man (read: less of a dick). “The Virginity Hit” helmer Huck Botko will direct with a script by Jeff Tetreault. [Variety]
“The OC” star Adam Brody has joined the Fox Searchlight romantic comedy “Baggage Claim.” The David E. Talbert-helmed film is based on his bestselling debut novel and centers on Paula Patton as a flight attendant “pledging to keep herself from being the oldest and the only woman in her entire family never to wed. [She] embarks on a thirty-day, thirty-thousand-mile expedition to charm a potential suitor into becoming her fiance.” Brody is cast as “a flamboyant flight attendant” who helps Patton enact her plan to find a husband. [Variety]
