Ed Westwick, Brooke Shields, Tamsin Egerton & Bill Nighy Also On Board
The American Film Market is underway, and we’re expecting a tidal wave of project announcements and casting news in the next few days, as fledgling independent projects try to raise their budgets through pre-sales. We’ve already seen the likes of “Henry5” and Andrew Dominik‘s “Cogan’s Trade‘ announced via the market, and now we’ve got some casting news on another project.
“Trap For Cinderella” was one of the scripts on The Brit List last year — an adaptation of the novel by the late French writer Sebastian Japrisot (“A Very Long Engagement“), by writer-director Iain Softley (“K-Pax,” “Inkheart“). The plot (at least in the 2008 draft of the script we have) involves a young girl, Micky, who wakes up with amnesia, terribly burned, after a house fire in which her childhood friend Do died. As she recovers, she begins to suspect that she may actually be Do, and involved in a plot to murder her friend.
There’s been no news on the project since its Brit List placing, but now news has arrived that the project is moving forward, with a February shoot date planned, and that Softley has cast rising British actresses Imogen Poots and Felicity Jones in the project. Poots, one of our favorite young actresses, sprang to fame as one of the leads in “28 Weeks Later,” before turning in an excellent supporting performance in the Michael Douglas vehicle “Solitary Man.” She’s got an interesting slate of projects on the way, including Cary Fukunawa‘s “Jane Eyre” and the horror remake “Fright Night,” alongside Colin Farrell and Anton Yelchin, and was one of the contenders to play Gwen Stacy in the “Spider-Man” reboot before Emma Stone landed the part.
Jones, meanwhile, came to fame through British TV, and the eternally popular radio series “The Archers,” before turning in a pair of storming stage performances, in Polly Stenham‘s “That Face” and Enid Bagnold‘s “The Chalk Garden.” She’s popping up more and more on the big-screen, with the likes of “Brideshead Revisited” and “Cheri” in the recent past, and earlier in the year she was one of the few highlights of Ricky Gervais‘ misfire “Cemetery Junction.” She’ll next crop up in Julie Taymor‘s “The Tempest,” and has the British thriller “Albatross” and the romantic comedy “Chalet Girl” on the way next year.
The pair will be joined by a decent supporting cast, including the omnipresent Bill Nighy, Brooke Shields, “Gossip Girl” star Ed Westwick, fellow rising star Tamsin Egerton (“St. Trinian’s“) and hirsute British comedian Bill Bailey (“Hot Fuzz“). While the initial script draft was set mostly in Italy and France, with all supporting characters bar the two leads speaking in those languages, the cast here, and the filming locations of London and France, suggest that the locations have been moved.
We’re not the biggest fans of Softley’s work to date, although his adaptation of “The Wings of the Dove,” with Helena Bonham-Carter, was fairly decent. But we quite enjoyed the script for this one — it’s got the potential to be a vaguely campy Polanski-esque psychodrama in the vein of “Black Swan,” and the two excellent leads mean it’ll likely be worth checking out. Robert Jones (“The Usual Suspects“) and Dixie Linder (“The War Zone“) are producing, and all being well, filming will begin in February. [The Hollywood Reporter]