We don't yet know whether Leigh Whannel is writing himself a third outing as Specs in** Insidious: Chapter 3**, but there's news this morning that he's scored himself an acting gig in someone else's project. He'll be joining the home invasion thriller **Home Invasion (see what they did there?), showing up to cause trouble for Chandler Riggs, Bella Thorne, Ioan Gruffud and Natalie Martinez.
Seemingly along the usual Funny Games lines (but presumably without Haneke's finger-wagging agenda), Home Invasion sees a group of intruders imprisoning the Gruffud clan and putting them through "a life-and-death game with mysterious rules that become clear as the night unfolds". Whether Whannell is one of the invaders is slightly unclear: he's described as a "mysterious guest" who arrives at the house at some point in the procedings.
As we said, Whannell wrote himself the role of Specs in the Insidious films, and played Adam in the first Saw, which was also one of his scripts (he penned Saws 1-3 and exec-produced the rest). As an actor in films with which he wasn't otherwise involved, he's shown up in his pal James Wan's Death Sentence, Jody Dwyer's Dying Breed and Malik Bader's Crush. Pre-Saw, he had a small role in The Matrix Reloaded.
Home Invasion is the work of screenwriter Joseph Dembner and director Sean Carter. The Hollywood Reporter describes Carter as a commercials director, but he also has a background editing DVD documentaries (on the prestigious likes of Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Clint Eastwood), and was assistant to Jonathan Liebesman on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. So it's his first feature, but he's been around.
For this one he's secured the patronage of Joel Silver and Silver Pictures, and the film is currently in pre-production for a projected release next year.