It just keeps getting better and better. Only a day after Charlie Kaufman's wildly ambitious "Frank Or Francis" landed its first female leads in Kate Winslet and Catherine Keener, another exceptionally talented thesp is coming on board.
THR reports that Elizabeth Banks has joined the crazed musical satire, adding another strong voice to the already first-rate cast. She'll join Steve Carell, Jack Black, Nicolas Cage and Kevin Kline in the film that will follow three characters — pretentious screenwriter Frank Arder (Carell); an online film blogger (Black); and a major comedian on the decline (Cage) — through an elaborate plot that will find their lives and careers intersecting. Banks will take the role of an actress who has made a series of comedy bombs who starts up an affair with Arder. Still no word on the role for Keener.
Update: THR updates that the film is also adding Paul Reubens to the cast (fucking great). He'll be playing an old-school film critic. Kate Winslet is not in the film despite previous reports.
This is certainly come good news for Banks (and fans of Banks) whose own recent films — "The Next Three Days," "Our Idiot Brother," "The Details" (sitting on The Weinstein Company shelf somewhere), this weekend's "Man On A Ledge" and the upcoming "What To Expect When You're Expecting" — haven't been so hot. That said, she's generally one of the best things of anything she's in. She'll certainly have some great folks and material to work with here. Still no word on when this rolls, but let's hope it's soon.