Another day, another round of casting news for Quentin Tarantino’s WWII epic “Inglorious Bastards.” He wasn’t kidding when he said he was casting this thing quick.
Here’s what we have so far. Brad Pitt is now officially in as Lt. Aldo Raine which should at least salvage any scenes that has the American Basterd soldiers in it if the rest of the casting gets too out of hand (we really hope Pitt held out to say, “ok, sounds great, but who else is gonna be in this thing with me?”). As we said in our ‘Bastards’ casting suggestion piece, he’s perfect for the role. B.J. Novak is probably to play one of the younger solider, Private First Class Utivitch. It also looks like Eli Roth will eventually play Sgt. Donny Donowitz, the fearsome “Bear Jew” who beats Nazi’s to a pulp with a baseball bat. This seems likely. How do we know this? Cause QT like casting his friends: case in point, the newest names just announced according to Variety (none are locked in so far, but all are “in talks’).
Simon Pegg, Eli Roth and Tarantino are all good buddies. And now Simon Pegg is being looked at for a role. Pegg is being eyed for the role of the buttoned-up and no-nonsense British lieutenant Lt. Archie Hicks (what’s next giving Edgar Wright a role too? That would be like a Saturday night for those guys).
Also being looked at is German born actress Nastassja Kinski. Variety doesn’t say which character they’d have her play, but the Hollywood Reporter says she’d play a German actress, which mean she’d be playing the part of Bridget Von Hammersmark. You’ll recall we did sort of suggest her too (” There’s always Nastassja Kinski too, but what the hell has she been up to in recent years?”), but then again, we took a wild stab at many women we thought could be right for the role (“There’s many ways you can cast the role of Von Hammersmark”). Kinski is frankly an excellent choice.
Adding to his Bastards is the appropriately very-Jewish David Krumholtz who will play one of the Bastard soldiers in the script, but neither report say which one (at this point he’ll likely play Pvt. Hirschberg, one of the last few memorable Bastards; the main soldiers in the script after Raine are Utivitch, Hirschberg and Donowitz).
Quentin may be a numbnut half the time, but he didn’t want to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as a evil German Colonel and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Britney Spears, so at least he has some sense. And most of these casting choices we can live with and or they’re just plain good. We later did say we thought the Bastards would be younger 25-30 after initially overshooting their ages (with some retrospect, we figured Michael Madsen wouldn’t play a soldier and it looks like he won’t; at least not a Bastard), so these younger guys make sense and fit.
Now we just hope our inside tip of Michael Bacall pans out. We also heard that Adam Goldberg auditioned, but we’re not sure what happened with that. That would be a nice choice, but at this point, the leftover Bastards are a bit too small for him we think.