Jack O'Connell to tilt at lead role in Terry Gilliam's revived Don Quixote film
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Version 0 of 1. Former Skins star Jack O’Connell’s latest high-profile Hollywood role will be as the lead in Terry Gilliam’s famously long-gestating Don Quixote movie, the director’s seventh attempt to bring the story to the big screen, reports Variety. O’Connell, who is also starring in Angelina Jolie’s second world war biopic Unbroken and currently on screens in the Troubles-set thriller ‘71, will play the role variously earmarked for Johnny Depp and Ewan McGregor in previous iterations of Gilliam’s fantasy epic. The UK-based film-maker hopes to finally begin shooting in the spring for a 2016 release, a remarkable 17 years after the Spanish set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was hit by flash floods in 1999. “Seven is my lucky number so let’s break the curse and make it!” joked Gilliam of his Sisyphean efforts. The disastrous weather that plagued the shoot for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, along with veteran French star Jean Rochefort finding himself unable to film after being diagnosed with a double herniated disc, eventually saw Gilliam decide to abandon the movie. His Iberian travails are famously catalogued in the documentary Lost in La Mancha. In the original storyline for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Depp was due to play a 21st-century advertising executive who travels back in time to 17th-century Spain, where he meets Don Quixote (Rochefort, who spent seven months learning English for the role) and becomes involved in his adventures after Don Quixote mistakes him for Sancho Panza. Variety describes a rather different plot, in which a jaded commercials director named Toby (O’Connell) travels to Spain for a shoot and comes across a gypsy who gives him a copy of his student film, a reworking of the Don Quixote story set in a quaint local village. Moved by the discovery, the ad man sets off on a bizarre road trip to find the location where the student film was shot and gets caught up in a series of misadventures. “Our main character actually made a Don Quixote movie a lot earlier in his history, and the effect it had on many people wasn’t very nice,” Gilliam said of the new storyline in August. “Some people go mad, some people turn to drink, some people become whores.” There have previously been reports that John Hurt may play a Quixote-like character. The new film, now titled simply Don Quixote, is budgeted at $21m. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would reputedly have been one of the most expensive continental European films ever made at a cost of $32.1m. |