Now that Jolie, or more accurately her kids, have decided it’s time to get going with Maleficent, casting has geared up and already accumulated plenty of names.
Elle Fanning will play Aurora while Sharlto Copley, who just signed on as the long-sought villain in the Oldboy remake, will be appearing as the male lead. Filling out the rest of the cast will be folks like Imelda Staunton, Miranda Richardson, Kenneth Cranham, Sam Riley, and Lesley Manville. You’ll see that director Robert Stromberg’s live action telling of Sleeping Beauty has added two women well-known for portraying villains in fantasy films. Specifically, Staunton and Richardson both took turns in the Harry Potter films playing the most infuriating of side-villains, Dolores Umbridge and Rita Skeeter respectively. I avoided using the word “cunts” in place of “villains” up there, but Potter fans will agree that those are some mightily hateful characters.
It’s interesting that while Wicked has never managed to get off the ground as a feature film, both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty will soon have darker, live-action retellings of famous fables with their female villains as the focus. If The Huntsman flick does well, surely that Wicked greenlight will happen? Might be good to get in the pipeline now so it can follow up the blockbuster Oz revisting…
Man, I’m just bringing the cutting-edge chair armchair production head advice over here at CHUD.com!
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