Update: Deadline reports that father/son team James and Laurence Fox have joined the film as King George V and his son Bertie respectively.
Pop legend Madonna didn’t exactly have the most auspicious start to her directorial career with the 2008 drama “Filth & Wisdom.” The film, which starred Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz, was pretty much slaughtered when it premiered at Berlin, and only saw a release in the States at the end of last year, going straight to DVD. Hopes were initially higher for her follow up, “W.E,” which contrasts the love affair between King Edward VIII and American divorcee Wallis Simpson, which led to him giving up his throne, with a contemporary romance between a woman in a loveless marriage and a Russian security guard.
But the two biggest names attached, Vera Farmiga and Ewan McGregor, who were set to play Wallis and Edward, dropped out, and now word has come in that American actress Margo Stilley has left the project over the ever-popular ‘creative differences.’ Stilley’s not exactly a household name, but is probably most familiar for her lead role in Michael Winterbottom’s “9 Songs,” although she’s mostly managed to overcome her notoriety in that with roles in the likes of “How To Lose Friends And Alienate People” and the long-delayed, possibly unreleasable “Hippie Hippie Shake.”
It doesn’t bode particularly well, but then Stilley’s role was likely a small one, and she may be simply doing a bit of damage control. The cast that is in place, led by Playlist favorite Abbie Cornish, with Andrea Riseborough, Oscar Isaac and James D’Arcy also on board, is very strong, so despite the director’s past form, we won’t write this one off entirely. In related news “The Tudors” star Natalie Dormer has signed on to the project, which is currently filming in London, to play Queen Elizabeth (who was married to Edward’s successor George VI, and was the mother of the current Queen Elizabeth II). [Telegraph, via Digital Spy]