Ryan Reynolds, Shia LaBeouf, Taylor Kitsch, Chris Pine, Sam Worthington, Garrett Hedlund, Zac Efron, Channing Tatum, Chris Hemsworth and Jake Gyllenhaal are all in contention to star in “Safe House,” a thriller based on a spec script by US magazine editor David Guggenheim that was the subject of a bidding war won by Universal earlier this year. Update: THR say that Tom Hardy and James McAvoy are also on the list of would-be co-stars.
The reason why every young actor wants to come aboard comes down to two simple reasons: director Daniel Espinosa who made the highly buzzed about “Snabba Cash” and Denzel Washington, who is signed on for the lead role. The film itself has been described as a mix between “Collateral” and “Three Days of the Condor” and “follows a young U.S. intelligence agent who must go on the run with a newly arrived prisoner after his titular safe house comes under attack” and is slated to begin production next year with South Africa and Argentina being scouted as potential locations. Yes, money is going to be spent hard on this thing.
We seriously don’t have time to run down the what-ifs of this extensive list only to say Ryan Reynolds is apparently the front-runner for the gig (how many times have we heard that someone was a “frontrunner”); that Chris Pine’s involvement may depend on his schedule for the forthcoming Jack Ryan reboot “Moscow,” which is shooting later this year, and that Zac Efron may actually be a more likely candidate than we suspect given that his production shingle (yes, he has one) snagged the remake rights for “Snabba Cash” earlier this year.
The last time we saw this many young actors was for the casting of Marc Webb’s “Spider-Man” and for Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”…..oh yeah, what’s going with that anyway?