I love when filmmakers cut out the middle men (which is to say: the middle men that aren’t me) and go straight to tools like twitter to blurt out their news. This morning, Darren Aronofsky used a tweet to announce what is likely not a huge piece of casting, but definitely an interesting one.

@DarrenAronofsky i’m honored to be working with the great sir anthony hopkins. we just added him to the stellar cast of #Noah. #methuselahlives

And while we’ve had tweeted news like this before, this might be the first major motion picture role announcement via hashtag methinks.

Methuselah is best known for being the last righteous man, save for Noah and his family, from the generations of man following Adam and Eve in the Genesis stories of the Hebrew Bible. While his story makes up all of two or three sentences in the bible, he’s notable for being the longest-living listed human being

and whose death marked the point at which God was willing to obliterate man from the Earth (but not before delaying the flood a week so that Methuselah could be properly mourned).

This brings up the interesting point of how Aronofsky’s film will interpret the profoundly old motherfuckers running around in Genesis — if you don’t go with any of the “tenth years” or more symbolism-based interpretations of the ages of early man — as Methuselah lived to be 969 years old in most translations. That’s a lot of make-up.

via The Film Stage