Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton share a child but not a home. They apparently live in two houses, side by side, with each decorating their own place to their own taste. They do seem to share one career more and more, though – Burton has just cast her in the female lead in his adaptation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, meaning that she’s been in every single one of his movies since 2001’s Planet of the Apes, where she played a MILF (Monkey I’d Like to Fuck).
At last year’s Toronto Film Festival, Burton told me (and by me I mean a big room filled with reporters, one of whom happened to be me) that he doesn’t just cast Helena for the sake of keeping her happy. “I wouldn’t just cast her to cast her, in the same way I wouldn’t cast Johnny or somebody I love working with just to have them in the movie. You always want it to be the right thing and the right role. And I think she understands that, and I think most of the people I work with understand that.”
Hopefully she’s right for the role of Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd’s landlady and meat pie baker. She falls for the demon barber of Fleet Street and together they make murder – and she makes his victims into meat pies.
Sweeney Todd is shaping up to be a Tim Burton stock company reunion, as Johnny Depp will be singing his little Frenchie heart out as the killer barber. Of course there are alos newcomers to the clan: the casting of Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli means that maybe one day we’ll have a stop-motion animated Borat movie where he gets Gumby to reveal he despises Jews.