Jeff Daniels will be back on our screens this December as bumbling dim-bulb Harry Dunne in Dumb & Dumber To, but he’s looking for something that will showcase his smarts for a future role. The actor is in talks to join Ridley Scott’s next project, **The Martian{
Matt Damon is starring in the film as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, left stranded on Mars after his crewmates on the Ares 3 mission are forced to evacuate by a dust storm.
To stave off death on the Red Planet, Watney tries to rustle up water and grow crops. Meanwhile, his fellow astronauts are kept in the dark about his survival during their voyage back to Earth on the Hermes spacecraft. NASA struggles to find some way to rescue Watney, while the Hermes astronauts add their efforts once they finally discover he’s alive. Daniels, assuming he locks in a deal, would be the NASA director who must decide how much to tell Watney’s colleagues about his dire straits.
He’s just one of the people circling the film, with Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara and Michael Pena all figuring out their schedules and trying to hammer out deals to co-star, but none of them are confirmed yet.
Scott is set to kick off shooting in November, working from Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s self-published sci-fi tome.
Daniels is, as, mentioned above, returning for Dumb & Dumber To, out on December 19, but he’ll also be back behind a studio desk for the third and final season of HBO’s The Newsroom, which kicks off on November 9 in the US and, if it keeps to the usual schedule, shortly after that on Sky Atlantic here.