We can’t be the only ones who feel like Ellie Kemper is going to be a giant movie star. The 31-year-old actress, a graduate of Princeton, Upright Citizen’s Brigade, The Onion and McSweeney’s, has been one of the shining lights of “The Office” since her introduction as touched-in-the-head receptionist Erin a couple of seasons back, and after supporting roles in “Mystery Team,” “Get Him To The Greek” and Sofia Coppola‘s “Somewhere,” she broke-out on the big-screen in a major way this summer in the mega-hit “Bridesmaids.”
It’s only a matter of time before she follows her co-star in that film, Kristin Wiig, and lands a leading role of her own (although it may have to wait until “The Office” wraps up), but in the meantime, Variety reports that she’s just landed a role in one of our more anticipated comedies of next year, the TV remake “21 Jump Street.”
Filming has been underway on the project, which stars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as cops who go undercover in a high school, for some time, with “Cloudy With Chance of Meatballs” writer-directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller at the helm, and an impressive supporting cast including Rob Riggle and Dave Franco as the villains, Ice Cube as Hill and Tatum’s commanding officer, and Brie Larson, Johnny Simmons, Dakota Johnson, DeRay Davis and Jake M. Johnson along for the ride as well, not to mention a cameo from Johnny Depp, returning to the franchise that gave him his big break.
Kemper will play a potential love-interest for Tatum, Ms. Griggs, a sincere chemistry teacher who finds herself attracted to the unusually-old looking lunk-headed student. More Kemper can only be a good thing, and it’s a film that we’ve certainly got our hopes up for, even if Neal Moritz is producing, which means that the odds are stacked against it. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, right? Hill’s been hinting on his twitter account that a trailer for one of his upcoming projects will premiere in front of “Green Lantern” on Friday, and our gut says it’ll be ‘Jump Street,’ so we could see the first fruits of the labor very soon, before the movie opens on March 16, 2012.