Joel Edgerton Updates The Great Gatsby as New Cast Members are Revealed
Posted 08.23.11 by Ryan
Of all the 3-D productions that are being lined up right now, the one that has us most intrigued is director Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby.
Luhrmann has assembled an impressive cast for the movie, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the title character of Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Gatsby's love interest, Joel Edgerton as Daisy's husband Tom Buchanan, and Isla Fisher as Buchanan's mistress Myrtle. That's a scandalous amount of affairs for a movie based on a 1925 novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but, outside of a sequence toward the book's finale, we can't understand what 3-D will bring to the story. Admittedly, we're curious.
Edgerton, who was the most recent addition to the cast (taking over for Ben Affleck, who had to drop out), updated progress on the Australian production to Collider while doing press for his upcoming MMA drama, Warrior.
I can tell you as much as I know about Gatsby. We have been sort of in pre-production where we did a really great kind of exploration workshop in New York. I’m off on Monday and back to Australia where everything is getting prepped and ready. We are going to continue rehearsals and then we start shooting in a few weeks. Then it is all systems go until Christmas.
Luhrmann has also added more actors to his cast. Australia's The Telegraph reports that Jack Thompson, who appeared in Luhrmann's Australia, has joined the cast in an undisclosed role, though we guess he could be playing either Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler with mafia ties, Dan Cody, Gatsby's mentor in the ways of high society, or, possibly, Henry Gatz, Gatsby's father.
Also joining the cast is Kim Knuckey (The Outsider, the Australian mini-series Underbelly: Razor), who has been cast as a senator.
According to the report, The Great Gatsby will start production on September 5, and lists Luhrmann's budget at $150 million. That should be enough dough for Fitzgerald's story about the power of myth amidst the affluence of the 1920s.