Quentin Tarantino has picked up three more Inglorious Bastards.
Well, we say three more, but of the three actors to sign on for QT’s eagerly-awaited World War II movie, only one will actually be playing one of the Jewish soldiers wreaking merry havoc behind enemy lines in occupied France.
That actor is Paul Rust, although we’re not sure which of the Bastards he’ll be playing. But he joins Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, B.J. Novak and Samm Levine as the standout members of the hard-bitten troupe.
The other two actors to sign on are Diane Kruger, who will be taking on the role that we thought Nastassja Kinski had been earmarked for. Kruger will play Bridget Von Hammersmark, a German movie idol who becomes involved with the Bastards and their plan to… no, wait for the movie. But she has at least a couple of nail-biting sequences, including a sequence with a British officer (Michael Fassbender, in the role that Simon Pegg had to pass on) that promises to be one of the best of Tarantino’s career. (And if you’re wondering, yes, we’ve read the script that was floating around online; who hasn’t at this stage?)
It’s a cracking role, though – while many might have thought that Bastards would be a sausage-fest, with no real roles for actresses, QT has actually written at least two storming parts for females. Von Hammersmark is one, while the other – Jewish heroine Shoshanna – has yet to be cast.
And the third cast member? That’s German actor Christoph Waltz, who will play the movie’s bad guy, Colonel Landa, a Nazi officer so fearsome that he has earned the sobriquet, The Jew Hunter. Landa is a dream of a part – urbane, psychotic and highly intelligent, he’s the kind of guy who dominates the action even when he’s not onscreen, and it’s interesting to see that Tarantino has plumped for a German to play him, as this was the role that Leonardo DiCaprio had originally been circling.
Filming starts on October 13 in Germany, with Tarantino aiming to have Inglorious Bastards premiere at Cannes next year.