Spending years playing the devil-child-with-daddy-issues Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter franchise might be enough evil for one career. But Tom Felton clearly thinks there’s more bad boy juice to be squeezed from celluloid: he’s signed on toPlanet of the Apesorigin tale**Rise of The Apes **to play Brian Cox’s son.
Cox, as has already reported, is the villain of the movie, a hard-hearted type who runs a primate sanctuary but thinks little of mistreating his ape charges. Unless Felton’s playing against type, we’re guessing he’ll be a bad sort, never happier than when he’s dangling bananas just out of the reach of the tormented simian inhabitants.
We’re also guessing he’ll won’t have an easy time of it when Caesar (with Andy Serkis playing him through the magic of Weta’s performance-capture tech), a genetically tinkered, intelligent ape, leads an uprising of his fellows and overthrows the humans at the San Francisco facility. Leading, of course, to the future visited by Chuck Heston in the original film, with the damn dirty apes, the human savages and the beached Statue of Liberty. Assuming, of course, that the plot really is pointing towards the original franchise’s plotline – for all anyone knows, they could be building an entirely fresh timeline. We just hope it doesn’t lead to the Tim Burton version.
James Franco, Freida Pinto and John Lithgow are also in the cast for Rupert Wyatt’s film, which is set to kick off shooting shortly for a June 2011 release date.