Here’s some inspired casting. Ian McShane is in negotiations with Disney to appear in “Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” aka “Pirates 4” alongside Johnny Depp and new female lead Penelope Cruz.
McShane will play the central antagonist, the pirate Blackbeard. Cruz’s role is elucidated somewhat as THR calls her Depp’s “foil and equal” in a story that centers around the Fountain of Youth (hopefully someone saw “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and realized how funny Cruz can be when speaking in her native tongue; can popcorn-munching pleebs tolerate that?).
Modern day audiences know McShane as the brash perennial f-bomb dropper from HBO’s Western drama “Deadwood,” (which he won SAG, Emmy and Golden Globe awards for) or even from Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 film, “Sexy Beast,” where he sort-of reprised the heyday roles that Brit cinephiles will remember him for, in B-movie gangster pictures portraying ruthless tough guys, like “Sitting Targets” (1972), “Freelance” (’71) or “Villain” (’71; and the cut homosexual sex scene from “Villain” is what Glazer might have been eluding too in that striking, not so ambiguous water-soaked sex-scene of “Sexy Beast”).
Depp recently told reporters at an “Alice In Wonderland” press conference that one of the main reasons he came back to “Pirates 4” (other than now-ousted Disney chief Dick Cook and the quadrillion dollar paycheck that will put his kids through college six times) was because of director Rob Marshall‘s inspired and fresh read on the material. “We’re going to come at it with a different angle at it. And Rob Marshall has a completely different take on it,” he said. Does that mean singing and dancing ala “Nine”? Considering how poorly “Nine” did in theaters this past December you can easily bet against it. But to bring back the playful whimsy of the first one instead of the self-importance gravitas of ‘Pirates 2 & 3’? That would be a smart idea on everyone’s part.
Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot wrote the script, Jerry Bruckheimer is producing and ‘Pirates 4’ is supposed to shoot this summer in Hawaii. While his name hasn’t been officially attached yet by the trades, Geoffrey Rush said he would be apart of the 4th film last fall. Also, you’ll see some trying to make news out of the fact that Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley won’t be involved in this film, but that news is so damn old we can’t even remember when it was first reported. Feels like at least two years ago.