Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, and Christopher Walken will all be joining Colin Farrell for the black comedy, Seven Psychopaths, Variety is reporting, making the leading cast more than impressive.
The film is to be written and directed by Martin McDonagh, who has already proven his creative talents working with Farrell on 2008’s In Bruges, which won McDonagh a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and Farrell a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. Let’s hope that Seven Psychopaths will see a repeat performance of McDonagh’s success.
Adding three other big names to the list should certainly help. Rockwell has truly been a rising star recently, especially in the last few years, taking major roles in Frost/Nixon, Moon, Iron Man 2, and the upcoming Cowboys & Aliens, and he’s one of my favourite actors working at the moment, and a role in a black comedy is a perfect fit for him. Rourke starred alongside Rockwell in Iron Man 2, so there is already a chemistry there, and Rourke is one of those actors that always brings his best. The same can of course be said for Walken, who is still going strong in his career at 68 years of age with over 50 years in the business, and is just simply brilliant.
Farrell is one of the best (and sadly, relatively few) Irish actors at the moment who has found success on both sides of the Atlantic, starring in very successful U.S. films like Phone Booth and Daredevil, and also taking roles in smaller British and Irish films like London Boulevard and Ondine. He’s currently filming Fright Night and has taken the lead in the Total Recall remake, and if you caught the first trailer for Horrible Bosses, you’ll know we’ll be seeing him again soon this summer in that.
Seven Psychopaths,
“follows a screenwriter (Farrell) struggling for inspiration for his script, “Seven Psychopaths,” who gets drawn into the dog kidnapping schemes of his oddball friends (Rockwell and Walken). Things take a turn for the worse when a gangster’s (Rourke) mutt goes missing.”
When done well, a good play-within-a-play can be a brilliant idea (with similar examples ranging all the way from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.), and be a lot of fun to illuminate parts of the whole within itself, should McDonagh chooses to take that direction with the film. Either way, adding Rockwell, Rourke, and Walken to the cast is excellent news in my books, and with the project to be sold at Cannes in the coming days, I’m hoping it will be another big success for everyone involved.
