Plus Rosamund Pike Talks Her Approach To The Character
For a film that, when first announced, enraged fans of the franchise, and seemed like a firmly skippable programmer to the rest of us, “One Shot” is going quite some way towards winning people round. The creation of writer Lee Child, Jack Reacher is a mountain of a man, an ex-military policeman-turned-drifter who’s starred in fifteen novels with a fervent fanbase, and the news that Tom Cruise would play the character in a film directed by “The Usual Suspects” writer Christopher McQuarrie upset many.
But even if Cruise isn’t how people imagined Reacher, he’s got a hugely impressive supporting cast behind him for “One Shot,” which sees Reacher embroiled in the trial of a sniper accused of the murder of five people. There’s a host of interesting rising names involved, including “Rise of the Apes” star David Oyelowo as a homicide detective, “An Education“‘s Rosamund Pike as the sniper’s defense attorney, and the lesser-known Jai Courtney and Alexia Fast. But there’s also a host of excellent veterans involved too, with Robert Duvall playing an ex-marine, Richard Jenkins as Pike’s character’s father, the DA, and, most excitingly of all, Werner Herzog as the villain, a former war criminal known as The Zec.
The latest casting isn’t as head-spinning as the Herzog announcement, but to a certain few, including this writer, it’s still excellent news; The Hollywood Reporter announces that Michael Raymond-James has joined the cast, in the role of Linsky, a career criminal who works for The Zec. The actor’s probably best known for playing René Lenier, the serial killer antagonist in the first season of “True Blood,” but he was also the co-star, with Donal Logue, in FX‘s amazing, much-missed “Terriers,” a private detective series that aired last year to wide (and totally deserved) acclaim, and minimal viewership, leading to it being cancelled after the first season.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly huge role, but we’re glad to see Raymond-James getting more work, and it’s another great addition to a cast that looks to elevate the film above the John-Grisham-meets-“Shooter” procedural that it seemed to be on paper. And it sounds like McQuarrie isn’t prepared to led it sink into genre cliches either: Rosamund Pike talked to The Guardian today, and says that she’s planning, with the director, to do something a little different.
The actress tells the paper that, “What I’m trying to do is rethink the visual language in which American female lawyers seem to appear on screen. There must be a way of being someone who hasn’t got time to do her hair, but obviously she’s got a knack of doing something. You think of Jodie Foster in ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ that first shot when she’s running and she’s so sweaty, and they never let people do that. It’s always heels, Jimmy Choos or something that a lawyer would never wear.” Pike tells that she emailed McQuarrie to tell him of her plans to break the mould a little with the part, and she relates that “He said: ‘I think we already broke it by casting you.'” We’ll find out if it all works when the film opens on February 8th, 2013.