Casting News: Tom Hardy to Play Al Capone in Cicero; Hunger Games Actress Joins Will and Jaden Smith in After Earth
Posted 01.13.12 by Ryan
Since his performance in 2010's Inception, British actor Tom Hardy has been appearing non-stop in a variety of roles: A MMA fighting sibling in Warrior; a British spy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; the villainous (and hard to understand) Bane in the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises; and yet another role as a spy in the upcoming comedy This Means War. With Hardy already slated to play Max Rockatansky in the upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road (shooting this April), the actor is also lining up a trilogy of movies to follow.
According to The Wrap, Hardy is attached to star as Al Capone in the gangster trilogy Cicero for Harry Potter director David Yates after being mentioned as a possibility last year. The movies will track Capone's rise and fall from the slums of Brooklyn to being one of the top mobsters in Prohibition-era Chicago.
The script, originally written by Wild bunch screenwriter Walon Green in the 1970s, is still being worked on by Yates, but Hardy is already doing his homework. Hardy told Daily Mail that he's been at Warner Bros. "watching their gangster films" in order to get "a bit of Capone into the bloodstream." Hardy also revealed that Cicero may or may not be a trilogy of movies.
The idea at the moment is of doing a trilogy of films, but nothing is set. Everyone is just talking and exploring.
Should Cicero reach production, particularly as a trilogy, Hardy will be hard at work playing Capone well into 2014, according to the report.
***
After landing the role of knife expert Clove in the upcoming adaptation of The Hunger Games last year, THR reports that actress Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan) is starting 2012 by joining the cast of After Earth, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi movie starring Will Smith and his son Jaden (The Karate Kid).
Formerly titled One Thousand A.E., the movie is set 1,000 years in the future when Earth is no longer inhabitable. When the Smiths crash-land onto Earth, it's up to the younger Smith, a failed warrior, to rescue his father. Fuhrman will play Rayna, a friend of Jaden's character.
Shyamalan wrote After Earth with with Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli), and production is set to begin in March for a loosely scheduled 2013 release. Shyamalan's previous effort, The Last Airbender, swept the Razzies, the awards that "celebrate" the worst movies of the year and was widely considered a bomb. We're pretty sure Shyamalan won't make that kind of mistake again. At least, we hope.