Casting Round-Up: New Films for Carell, Hader; Plus ‘30 Minutes’ Cast Shapes Up

Steve Carell

Some new casting bits have developed right before the holiday weekend. The latest casting round-up includes a musical biopic for Steve Carell, a leading role for Bill Hader and familiar names join the cast of Aziz Ansari & Danny McBride’s 30 Minutes or Less.

Steve Carell may be playing pop songwriter Dennis Lambert in the biopic Of All The Things. Lambert is the songwriter of the 1980s hit “We Built This City,” in addition to other tunes including The Four Tops’ “Are You Man Enough” (a song so effectively used in Superbad.) Lambert’s solo career never took off, but one of his songs, “Of All The Things,” became an anthem in the Philippines, while he stepped away from he music business to sell luxury real estate. A documentary following Lambert’s first sold-out arena tour of the Philippines (at the age of 60!) made waves across the film festival circuit, and now Warner Brothers has acquired to develop his story into a comedic biopic for Carell (who has a production shingle at the studio.) This is one of many projects Carell has to choose from, which may be his reason for wanting to exit The Office one year from now.

Bill Hader

Bill Hader is planning his attempt at being a big screen leading man in Dog of the South. At the Los Angeles premiere of Get Him to the Greek, producer Rodney Rothman (a Team Apatow vet of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Year One and Undeclared) revealed to Collider that he is developing the project for Hader to star and Superbad director Greg Mottola to helm. Hader would star as an uptight man from Arkansas chasing his ex-wife through Central America. The film doesn’t have a start-date, as Mottola is still in post-production on next year’s Simon Pegg comedy Paul (also co-starring Hader), but one could assume the project wouldn’t move into production for at least another year when Hader is on hiatus from the next season of SNL. Rodney Rothman is currently developing a space-horror comedy titled The Something, following four friends trapped in space for five years in what develops into a comedic version of Alien.

Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Peña and Nick Swardson round-out the cast for the Aziz Ansari/Danny McBride action comedy 30 Minutes or Less. The project,  described as “Pineapple Express with more heart,” follows a pizza delivery man named Will (Eisenberg) having a fallout after dating the sister of his best friend Chet (Ansari.) Will later has a bomb strapped to him by two criminals (McBride and Swardson) who force him to rob a bank. Peña will play a tattooed assassin following the team of bank robbers. 30 Minutes reunites Eisenberg with Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, and cherry picks the supporting cast of Observe and Report (McBride, Ansari and Peña.) The film, produced by Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld, begins filming in Grand Rapids, Michigan this July, with a target release date of August 12, 2011.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2010 at 11:27 pm and is filed under 30 Minutes or Less, Aziz Ansari, Bill Hader, Casting, Danny McBride, Paul, Rumor, Steve Carell, Zombieland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.