After years on the shores of development, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is finally getting ready to set sail with Neil Marshall at the helm. And it looks as if its most prominent passenger might be Viggo Mortensen.
Bloody Disgusting's sources suggest that Viggo has been offered a character called Henry Clemens. Quite what that role is remains to be seen. Previous casting stories, from the days when Stefan Ruzowitzky was supposed to be directing, placed Ben Kingsley as the Demeter's captain, and BD's mole says that he remains aboard. If that's the case, Viggo won't be on deck at the wheel. Noomi Rapace was also once mooted as a stowaway, but there's no word of her this morning, so she may have jumped ship.
Henry Clemens was the name of Mark Twain's brother, who was killed in a riverboat explosion in 1858... Yeah, OK, we're reaching. We've got nothin'.
What we do know, of course, is that the Demeter was the ship that brought the count to England in Bram Stoker's Dracula. In the book, the vessel arrives mysteriously, floundering on the Whitby shore, with no survivors aboard and only a single corpse: the ship's captain lashed to the wheel. Sorry Sir Ben.
The most recent draft of the screenplay is by Lowell Cauffiel, but there's still no start date. Can't be long now though, surely.