What’s going on with James Gray’s “The Lost City Of Z” other than having two stars attached in Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Pattinson? Well, like many ambitious indies out there, it’s seemingly struggling to get all its financing in place. But there is movement on the horizon. In various interviews with Vogue and The L.A. Times, Sienna Miller has stated that she’ll be joining Gray’s Amazonian mystery about a British explorer who ventured into the Amazon jungle in search of a fabled civilization, and never returned to his family.
Cumberbatch is set to play the lead Percival Fawcett, Pattinson is said to play Henry Costin, a bored British corporal who answers Fawcett’s advertisement for a jungle adventure abroad, and Miller would presumably play Fawcett’s wife as there aren’t many other main female characters in the book.
Miller is on a bit of tear these days, working on a lot of great or anticipated projects. She just finished working with Bennett Miller and Clint Eastwood on “Foxcatcher” and “American Sniper” respectively and she has a ton of work coming in 2015 including the Whitey Bulger drama starring Johnny Depp, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Mississippi Grind,” Ben Wheatley’s “High-Rise” and Ben Affleck’s “Argo” follow-up “Live By Night.” The Sienna Miller resurgence? Let’s wait til at least awards season 2015 before we make any proclamations. Gray had hoped to shoot the movie in early 2015, but that release date keeps sliding and shifting. In a recent interview, “Lost City Of Z” producer Dede Gardner (Brad Pitt’s producer for his Plan B production shingle; Pitt was once attached to play the lead) she said she’s hoping for a summer 2015 shoot. Fingers crossed.