Russell Crowe may be playing the wrong part in “Winter’s Tale.”
Akiva Goldsman has a lengthy filmography as a screenwriter that ranges from an Oscar winner “A Beautiful Mind” to a disaster “Batman & Robin.” He’s got more good than bad, though, and a lot of producer credits, too. Now he’s trying to make his debut as a feature film director with his adaptation of Mark Helprin’s cult novel “Winter’s Tale.”
Here’s Amazon’s synopsis, so the casting news to follow makes sense:
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake–orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”) and Benjamin Walker (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”) are reading for the role that they describe as “a criminal on the run.” Do they mean the Peter Lake character described above? If so, then they are changing the entire tone of the book by bringing down the age of the main character. That’s a surprise–I think they would really lose something of the weird mystique of the story if they make the male lead young. They say Russell Crowe is attached as “the villain,” but Crowe would make much more sense as the male lead in terms of the synopsis. THR says Bella Heathcote (“In Time”), Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Gabriele Wilde (“The Three Musketeers”) and Sarah Gadon (“A Dangerous Method”) are up for the female lead. Put your money down on Olsen.
The whole project is dependent on locking down financing, so don’t get excited yet…
