Top cameo-based scoopage from The Hollywood Reporter today. According to the trade magazine, Johnny Depp has found a space in his schedule to pop up in London Fields in a role that may or may not involve the kind of heavy prosthetics that took a certain cop comedy by storm.
Depp is in the UK for Rob Marshall's Disney musical **Into the Woods and David Koepp's **Mortdecai, and word is that he already shot his scenes in the Martin Amis adaptation. The production got rolling in September with first-timer Mathew Cullen calling the shots and a cast including Billy Bob Thornton, Jim Sturgess, Underworld: Awakening's Theo James and Amber Heard.
Heard plays femme fatale Nicola, possessed of unusual beauty and hypnotic magnetism. Mysterious and clairvoyant, she sets a plan in motion to fulfil the prophecy of her own murder.
Caught up in Nicola’s plan are terminally ill writer Samson Young (Thornton), a lowly street hustler (Sturgess) and an unhappily married banker (James), who become intertwined in a love triangle that unfolds in the grimy underbelly of a dystopian London (written in 1989, the book was set in a dark 1999). Samson convinces Nicola to let him document her manipulations in a book she says will be his literary masterpiece, but only she knows who the tale will end and who her killer will be.
Roberta Hanley, who reshaped The Virgin Suicides for the big screen, has done similar with Amis' blackly comic caper. The Depp factor should crank up the anticipation levels of an already much-anticipated 2014 release a little further.