Casting: Rhys, Dern, Wiig, Paul, Ackie, Teller

Widow’s Bay
Emmy winner Matthew Rhys (“Perry Mason,” “The Americans”) has signed on to star in and executive produce the Apple TV+ series “Widow’s Bay”. Rhys will play the mayor of a coastal New England town who refuses to believe his constituents’ warnings that the place is cursed.

Katie Dippold (“The Heat,” “Haunted Mansion” ) created and showruns the series while Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”) is on board to direct the pilot and executive produce. Rhys is currently filming Netflix limited series “The Beast in Me” with Claire Danes and will shortly team with John Krasinski to film serial-killer drama “Silent River” for Amazon [Source: THR]

Is This Thing On?
Laura Dern (“A Marriage Story”) has joined the cast of Bradley Cooper’s next directorial effort “Is This Thing On?” at Searchlight. Cooper revealed the news on a post-Super Bowl episode of “The Pat McAfee Show”. Filming is slated to begin in two weeks with Will Arnett leading the cast. [Source: The Pat McAfee Show]

Epiphany
Kristen Wiig and Bill Murray are set to lead “Palm Springs” director Max Barbakow’s new comedy feature “Epiphany” at Rocket Science. Mitch Glazer (“The Recruit”) pens the film about a woman (Wiig) whose massive fortune evaporates overnight. She has two weeks to score a rich husband and fight creditors to stay off the street – leading her to target eccentric math savant and billionaire Oz Bell (Murray) [Source: THR]

The Night House
Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”) and Jacob Tremblay (“Good Boys”) have both been cast as different age versions of the same protagonist role in the new horror movie “The Night House” based on the 2023 novel by Jo Nesbø. Jesper Ganslandt helms directs and co-wrote the script with Nesbø.

The story follows a highschooler whose parents recently died. Moving to a remote town, he witnesses a classmate violently get sucked into a phone receiver inside a phone booth and vanish without a trace. No-one believes him bar one teen outsider and the pair soon realise they have unleashed terrifying evil forces. [Source: Variety]

Untitled Jason Statham Film
Naomi Ackie (“Blink Twice”) and Bodhi Rae Breathnach (“The Capture”) along with British veterans Bill Nighy and Daniel Mays, have joined an untitled Jason Statham action movie which shoots this week in the UK and Ireland.

Ric Roman Waugh directs from a script by Ward Parry. Statham will reportedly play a man pulled back towards the ghosts of his violent past. Black Bear (“Longlegs,” “Conclave”) is backing the project. [Source: Coming Soon]

Bartali
Miles Teller has signed on to star in “Bartali,” a biopic of famed 1930s Italian cyclist Gino Bartali who became an integral part in the Italian underground resistance in World War II. “Free Solo” and “Nyad” directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin helm the project from a screenplay by Karen Tenkhoff. [Source: Deadline]

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