Casting for Lars Von Trier's "psychological disaster movie" Melancholia is now complete. John Hurt was the last piece of the puzzle, and will slot in alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, Udo Kier, and Stellan and Alexander Skarsgard. Penelope Cruz was attached at one point, but went to Hawaii instead.
Hurt has worked with Von Trier before, on Dogville, which Melancholia superficially resembles at this point in terms of its large cast of recognisable names and faces (Von Trier called keeping them all in check "like a children's nursery, only twenty times worse!"). Hurt was Dogville's narrator though, which probably meant he avoided the cast angst and just got to sit in a sound booth with the script and a coffee, if Von Trier allows that sort of thing and didn't make him perform stripped naked and tied to a chair.
The director has been characteristically enigmatic about Melancholia so far. It seems to involve a new planet arriving in our solar system to dangerously dwarf the Earth, and was described by its producer Peter Jensen as "a beautiful film about the end of the world". Shooting starts in Sweden in mid-July, and we can almost certainly expect to see the Danish armageddon unveiled at next year's Cannes. Can it possibly get as visceral a reception as Antichrist?