With filming about to start on Righteous Kill, the Al Pacino/Robert De Niro thriller that has pretty big Heat-sized shoes to fill, director Jon Avnet has fleshed out the rest of his cast with some top-notch character actors.
John Leguizamo, showing that his candid autobiography Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas And All The Rest Of My Hollywood Friends: A Life hasn’t hurt his career at all, has signed on to join the cast as an NYPD cop who clashes with Pacino and De Niro’s detectives as they search for a vigilante serial killer. (Leguizamo has appeared with Pacino and De Niro before – in fact, he killed the former in Carlito’s Way and was in The Fan with the latter.)
Dan Futterman – Oscar-nominated screenwriter and good actor (recently seen as Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart) will play an attorney alongside Trilby Glover, while professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek will play a delinquent.
Good cast, then – with 50 Cent, Donnie Wahlberg and Carla Gugino already on board. And it could get even better, with the great Brian Dennehy in negotiations to play De Niro and Pacino’s captain. Given that filming starts tomorrow in Connecticut and the Big Apple, those negotiations must be fairly finalised.
So… is one of these fine actors the killer? We’ll have to wait for Righteous Kill to come out to know for sure, but if bookies gave a damn, they’d probably be slashing the odds on Leguizamo right now. Or it could be De Niro. Or Dennehy. Or Wahlberg. Or Pacino. Or…