With Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges set to lend their considerable talents to the supernatural tentpole “The Seventh Son,” the job is now finding a duo of young thesps to power this thing to the tween demographic it needs.
With Alex Pettyfer bowing out and Jennifer Lawrence now focused on “The Hunger Games,” a wide net is being cast for the roles of Tom and Alice in the film that follows the former, the seventh son of a seventh son in the 1700s who discovers he has the ability to see creatures of the dark, and trains to become a ‘Spook’ in order to fight evil. Bridges will play Master Gregory who trains Tom, while Moore is lined up as the villain, Mother Malkin, who sucks the blood out of young women to keep her youth. And as with most tentpoles these days, basically every young actor and actress of note in town is up for the open roles.
Variety reports that Sam Claflin (“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides“), Caleb Landry-Jones (Banshee in “X-Men: First Class“) and James Frecheville (“Animal Kingdom“) are testing for Tom, while Imogen Poots (“Solitary Man“), Felicity Jones (Sundance sensation “Like Crazy“), Alicia Vikander, Gabrielle Wild and Dianna Agron (“Glee“) are up for Alice
Screen tests were initially postponed as rewrites were done on the script to get it to where Bridges was comfortable, and now director Sergei Bodrov is getting the talent to read opposite the “True Grit” star to see what the chemistry is like. Should the casting come together and everything fall into place, the film will go in front of cameras later this summer presumably for a 2012 release.