With filming set to begin in April, it looks like casting is ramping up for the latest Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration, “Dark Shadows.” The film is based on the gothic 1960s television series that centered on Barnabas Collins, a vampire (to be played by Depp) who is in search of lost love, Josette.
Deadline reports that Jackie Earle Haley and rising actress Bella Heathcote are both in talks for roles in the film, and they are intriguing ones. Haley would play Loomis “a notorious con artist who comes to Collinwood bent on swindling the reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He winds up living in the mansion and hatches a plan when he observes a portrait of the late Barnabas Collins, who wore some serious bling. Loomis breaks into the mausoleum and pries open Barnabas’ coffin expecting to steal jewelry, he’s given the shock of his life when he’s attacked by the vampire and rendered the servant and whipping boy of the bloodsucker.” As for Heathcote, she is apparently “the choice to play Victoria Winters, the young governess of the Collins estate” (although Variety says she will play a “local waitress who Collins takes a shine to because she resembles his long-lost love” — clearly there are crossed wires here or maybe Heathote has a couple of options for what role she might take).
Anyway, Haley is pretty much solid in whatever you put him in and Hollywood has recently fallen in love with Heathcote — she’s been cast in Andrew Dominik‘s “Cogan’s Trade,” David Chase‘s “Twylight Zones” and was an early contender for “Snow White & The Huntsman” — so while we have yet to see her on screen, we figure there is good reason why she’s being lined up with top tier talent.
No release date for the film yet but its likely to hits multiplexes in 2012.