The casting for Quentin Tarantino’s seventh feature film, Django Unchained, has been getting pretty damn excellent in recent months, with the director lining up an incredibly talented group of actors to join him on his next venture.
And it seems the brilliant casting isn’t over yet, with Variety now reporting that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in talks to join the project, due out on Christmas Day next year.
Gordon-Levitt is currently hard at work filming Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated return to Gotham City, The Dark Knight Rises. He also has Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln on his schedule, so his involvement on Django Unchained isn’t concrete yet, and is dependent on whether it’s possible to fit everything in with each other. He is said to be intending to join the project though, which is certainly a good sign.
It would see him re-teaming with Leonardo DiCaprio after working with him on last year’s incredibly popular Inception, alongside the likes of Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, and Don Johnson.
Foxx is leading the film as the titular Django,
“a slave who’s liberated by a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter and taught the tricks of the trade by his mentor. Django’s major goal in life is to recover his wife, and to do it he needs to get past the villainous ranch owner Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), who runs Candyland, a despicable club and plantation in Mississippi where female slaves are exploited as sex objects and males are pitted against each other in “mandingo”-style death matches. Candie is a slave’s worst nightmare, and that is where Django’s wife Broomhilda is an abused slave.”
Tarantino is planning on starting production in New Orleans in January, and with a little bit of luck, Gordon-Levitt will be able to work the film into his schedule around then. His last film, Inglourious Basterds, took the Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz at last year’s Academy Awards, along with another seven nominations, and Django Unchained’s scheduled 25th December release date next year puts it perfectly in line for the 2013 Academy Awards.
The cast is already looking awesome, and the addition of Gordon-Levitt would only serve to further bolster that awesomeness. More news as we get it.
