Update: Deadline reports that Kathryn Bigelow's film has just juiced up, adding Jessica Chastain, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong to the cast. Damn. And oh yeah, remember the accusations last year that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were leaked classified documents so they could help write the screenplay in some elaborate scheme to get Barack Obama re-elected? Well, the Pentagon will now waste everyone's time and money and launch an official investigation into those rumors according to the LA Times.
Well, here's a piece of good news. Attached way back last spring for Kathryn Bigelow's upcoming untitled Seal Team 6 movie (aka "Kill Bin Laden"), we began to get worried about Joel Edgerton's involvement when the project began further casting this fall — adding Jason Clarke and Chris Pratt — and his name remained conspicuously absent. Well, whatever hesitation there was on either side (it appears Edgerton's flirtation with "300: Battle Of Artemisia" made things uncertain, as it would be shooting at roughly the same time) has been cleared, as Variety reports he's locked and loaded for the film.
With production set to begin next month for a December release, we expect we'll be hearing a lot more casting in the next few weeks, but one name that won't be considered any further is Rooney Mara. The actress was tipped for a role this fall along with a handful of other actors — Tom Hardy, Jennifer Ehle, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba and Nina Arianda (Carol from "Midnight In Paris") — but her extensive press rounds for "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (which are still ongoing) have kept her from taking the role.
Penned by Mark Boal, the film was initially set to be about the search for Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001, but the script had to be changed considerably once he was found and killed this summer. "I had signed on to do the project when the initial script was almost done. I knew what it was about and then Bin Laden was killed and then the whole thing was kind of like a house of cards, it had to be kind of knocked over and rebuilt," Edgerton told us in August. "The attempt to kill Bin laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 was no longer as relevant a story as what had just happened, but then what had just happened was so fresh and as we all know, history often needs time and perspective to kind of settle in everybody’s minds, you can’t just go and start shooting the movie in the next month and assume that you’re going to get everything right and have all of the information. So the project was put on hold for a while while Mark and Kathryn kind of gathered information…"
Kathryn Bigelow's film will hit theaters on December 19th.