I know a lot of you are skeptical that Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of the Hunter S. Thompson novel The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp as a thinly disguised Thompson, is actually set to go. But the production is really moving forward after years of existence as little more than a question mark on Depp’s career horizon.
Two names we really like will be complementing Depp and Amber Heard. Aaron Eckhart will play Sanderson, the third leg of a Depp/Heard love triangle, and a wealthy, cocky dude. Type of role that Eckhart can play in his sleep, which isn’t a jab at the guy, considering how good he is at it.
And Richard Jenkins, whose Oscar-nominated role in The Visitor currently has that film burning up the Netflix ‘Watch it now’ charts, will be Lotterman, the head of The Daily News, a fading newspaper that employs Depp’s Thompson analogue. Lotterman is a thinly veiled version of another real writer — William J. Kennedy, who edited the paper that declined to employ Thompson when he spent time in P.R. in 1960. Kennedy wrote Ironweed, which is a good reminder that one way to make The Rum Diary better would be to cast Tom Waits and the ghost of Fred Gwynne alongside Depp as fellow inebriated writers.