He might be best known right now for slipping into the spandex suit of The Amazing Spider-Man, but Andrew Garfield has plenty of other avenues open to him.And how: he’s just been picked by Martin Scorsese to star alongside Ken Watanabe in the director’s long-gestating passion project **Silence.
Garfield will be playing Father Rodrigues, a 17th century Portuguese Jesuit heading to Japan with a fellow priest to discover whether Rodrigues’ mentor has left the church. Their mission is complicated by the fact that religious persecution is rife in the country, necessitating that they travel undercover. Watanabe is set to be their interpreter and the cast also includes Issei Ogata.
Scorsese has been mulling a film of Shusaku Endo’s novel ever since he first read the book 25 years ago, and began working on an adaptation with writer Jay Cocks almost immediately. Their other films got in the way, the script wasn’t finished until 1996 and it’s taken years to lock down the financing and cast since then. He came close in 2006 and especially 2009 when Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio del Toro signed on, but it fell back into limbo.
Now, however, the money is in place and with the casting coming together, Scorsese is kicking off location scouting even as he finishes up editing The Wolf Of Wall Street. Hopefully it’ll finally get to hit our screens…