Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael Join ‘Poor Things’
It looks like both Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael have been cast along with Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest project, titled Poor Things.
News about Ruffalo broke on Friday night when Collider reported the casting. He will play a character named Duncan Wedderburn. Carmichael’s addition, on the other hand, was reported yesterday by Variety, who said that he will be playing the character of Harry Astley. They both join Emma Stone, who is set to play the lead role of Belle Baxter, as well as Willem Dafoe (Dr. Godwin Baxter), and Ramy Youssef (Max McCandless).
The movie was written by Oscar nominee Toby McNamara (The Favourite) and will be directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who already directed Stone into an Academy Award nomination with the 2018 movie. Poor Things will be produced by Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, as well as Lanthimos and Stone themselves.
Poor Things is an adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, and basically consists of a re-imagining of Frankenstein’s classic tale, where Belle Baxter (Emma Stone) drowns herself to escape from his abusive husband, and is then brought back to life with the brain of the fetus she was carrying. The surgery was performed by Dr. Baxter himself. If that doesn’t sound right up Lanthimos’ alley, I don’t know what does.
Mark Ruffalo earned a Golden Globe nomination for his performance on I Know This Much Is True. He recently wrapped on Netflix’s The Adam Project, along with Ryan Reynolds, and is currently filming the Marvel Disney Plus series She-Hulk (or at least the show is), where he’s reprising his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk.
Jerrod Carmichael’s upcoming directorial debut, On the Count to Three, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It was then acquired by Annapurna to be released through MGM’s Orion Pictures and United Artists Releasing thanks to a distribution deal between the two companies.
With this new chunk of news, it is only a matter of time before Poor Things begins principal photography. It is highly unlikely we’ll see it this year, though, as Lanthimos will probably want it played at the Venice Film Festival, where The Favourite gained a lot of positive momentum back in 2018. That usually happens in late August, so there’s really not that much time for him to finish it.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
