If you’re an actor, and you’re finding it hard to find the kind of roles you’d really like, the best thing you can do is get behind a typewriter and write them yourself. The latest to follow in the steps of, say, Jon Favreau and Edward Burns is Brit Marling, whose credits were relatively few before her acclaimed pair of films, “Another Earth” and “The Sound Of My Voice,” both of which she co-wrote, hit Sundance at the start of the year, instantly making her one of the fastest-rising stars around.
She’s had a bevy of offers of late, all for projects lensing this fall, with reports coming in last week that she’d turned down a part in Steven Soderbergh‘s male-stripper drama “Magic Mike” alongside Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer, and was mulling an offer to join Tom Cruise in thriller “One Shot.” But it looks like she’s firming up her schedule for the next few months: she’ll reunite with “The Sound of My Voice” director Zal Batmanglij on anarchist thriller “The East,” which is currently looking for an A-list star to join her for a planned October shoot, and now Variety reports that she’s signed on to one of the films she was previously circling: Robert Redford‘s “The Company You Keep.”
Redford will direct and star, from a script by “The Limey” writer Lem Dobbs, in the thriller about a former Weather Underground radical who’s forced on the run when he’s exposed by a young journalist — the latter character played by Shia LaBoeuf, while Nick Nolte is also in the cast. There’s no exact word on who Marling will play, but it’s a part described as the “female lead.” Wildwood Enterprises and Voltage Pictures are producing, and filming gets underway in September, so we should see the finished film before 2012 is out.