The trouble with the new transparency of the casting process — the stories that break at every stage of the process, from wishlist, to shortlist, to meetings, to screen-tests, to offers, to negotiations, to signing on — is that you can sometimes think that an actor’s firmly on board on a project based on one of these stories. More often than not, offer-stories lead to an actor actually being in the film, so when we reported a few weeks back that Lily Collins, rising star of “The Blind Side,” had been offered the female lead in “Odd Thomas,” the adaptation of Dean Koontz‘s mystery series about a short-order cook who can communicate with the dead, from “The Mummy” director Stephen Sommers, we’d filed it away, assuming that the offer was a formality, and that Collins would end up on the marquee for the picture, alongside Anton Yelchin, who’s playing the title role.
Except only days later, Collins signed on for the lead, opposite Julia Roberts and Armie Hammer, in Tarsem‘s big-budget fairy tale “The Brothers Grimm: Snow White” and Sommers was back to square one. His original short-list was said to include Emma Roberts, Kat Dennings and Portia Doubleday, but it’s another of the originally-mentioned candidates that looks to have landed the role, as Variety report that Addison Timlin is in negotiations to join the project, in the role of the excellently-named Stormy Llewellyn.
If you know Timlin, it’s most likely from the Showtime series “Californication,” where the 19-year-old actress recently played the latest in a string of David Duchovny‘s inappropriate conquests, but she also cropped up as Clive Owen‘s daughter in “Derailed” a few years back, and most notably starred alongside Ezra Miller in Antonio Campos‘ thoroughly excellent indie “Afterschool.” She certainly impressed in the latter, and we’re not surprised that her star is on the rise.
Furthermore, Bloody Disgusting, who initially broke the news of Anton Yelchin‘s casting, so presumably has some good sources here, reports that Oscar-winning veteran Tim Robbins is also circling a role in the picture. There’s no firm word on who Robbins would play, but it’s likely to be one of two roles — either the ‘Fungus Man,’ a stranger who Thomas believes is linked to an upcoming catastrophe, or, more likely, Chief Wyatt Porter, a local cop, and surrogate father to Yelchin’s character. The actor hasn’t been a total stranger to big-budget territory in recent years — he’s got a supporting role in the upcoming “Green Lantern” for instance, so it’s not outside the bounds of possibility that he might sign on here.
It’s a fairly promising cast, the material sounds interesting enough, and we’ve even heard some good buzz about the script, but with Sommers, whose last two films were the abysmal “Van Helsing” and “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra,” at the helm, we’re more than a little cautious. Hopefully he can regain some of the mojo that saw him make giant squid B-movie cult classic “Deep Rising” way back when. The independently-produced picture gets underway on May 2nd in New Mexico, for a release in 2012.