Casting Couch: A Tale of Two Joshes
In this edition of Casting Couch, Lost’s Josh Holloway is hoping to find some big-screen success and Josh Hartnett is heading to the stage to channel his inner Tom Cruise.
The 37-year-old Holloway, who plays badass con man Sawyer on ABC’s hit series, is climbing aboard the Polish brothers’ Stay Cool, touted as a “knowing-your-age comedy.”
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Holloway joins an ensemble that includes Winona Ryder, Sean Astin, Chevy Chase, Hilary Duff, Jon Cryer and Mark Polish, who cowrote the screenplay with twin brother Michael, who will direct.
The plot revolves around a writer (Polish) who returns to his hometown and has an unexpected reunion with a former high school classmate (Ryder), who still harbors an unrequited love for him. At the same time, the author must fend off a young student (Duff) with the hots for him.
Holloway plays a former high school jock and ex-beau of Ryder’s character.
Hartnett, meanwhile, will top the marquee in a stage version of the 1988 Best Picture winner, Rain Man.
The 29-year-old Sin City star plays Cruise’s character, Charlie Babbit, on London’s West End. British thespian Adam Godley takes on the role of his autistic savant of a brother, Raymond Babbit, played to Academy Award perfection onscreen by Dustin Hoffman.
Playwright Dan Gordon, whose film credits include The Hurricane and Wyatt Earp, is adapting Rain Man for the boards. The scribe previously penned a theatrical take on Terms of Endearment, which toured the U.K. Rain Man bows at the Apollo Theatre on Aug. 28 and runs through Dec. 20.
In other casting news:
- Val Kilmer has joined the indie drama Silver Cord, based on a true story about a man who’s successfully revived after being declared clinically dead on multiple occasions. It starts lensing in September.
- Tom McCarthy, best known for directing the indie hits The Station Agent and The Visitor, has signed on to play the boyfriend of Amanda Peet’s character in Roland Emmerich’s latest end-of-the-world extravangaza, 2012. The would-be Hollywood blockbuster follows a group of people who must survive a series of natural disasters, and costars John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt. Shooting starts in August in Vancouver.
- Young Jeezy is set to make his feature acting debut in fellow hip-hopster Ice Cube’s upcoming comedy, Janky Promoters, playing a young emcee who gets involved with a pair of crooked concert promoters.
- William Hurt has been tapped to star in The Rivery Why, a coming-of-age drama adapted from the 1983 Sierra Club novel of the same name. The Oscar winner plays the father of Gus (Zach Gilford), a young man on a mission to catch an elusive rainbow trout. Amber Heard plays Gus’ girlfriend, a tomboy fly-fisher.
- Upright Citizens Brigade comic Jason Mantzoukas has landed a starring role in Off Duty, a pilot for NBC about cops who can’t leave their job at the station.
Who is in Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts
Robert Rodriguez always has like five projects going at the same time. He’s been hard at work “developing” Barbarella (or trying to convince the studio to give him the money to make it with his future wife Rose McGowan in the lead) and just announced a TV show called Women In Chains (also starring Rose McGowan), which he’s pitching to various networks, but his next feature film to go into production will be… drumroll please…
Shorts is a family comedy adventure that follows an 11-year-old boy who is hit in the head with a rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes to anyone who holds it. Chaos erupts in this small suburb where “all the houses look the same and everyone works for Black Box, manufacturer of the ultimate communication and do-it-all gadget.” Sounds more Spy Kids or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D than Grindhouse or Sin City. Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann and James Spader have signed on to star. I’m surprised Rodriguez didn’t try to squese McGowan into this project as well. Rodriguez, always a one-man show, will direct based on his own screenplay, and serve as producer, director of photography, editor, visual effects supervisor and, who knows, he might even provide the score (not yet confirmed). But what else is new?
Andrew McCarthy: In the Limelight
While the casting for the ladies to play the power brokers on NBC’s Lipstick Jungle was imperative, no less attention was paid for the men with whom those women would be romantically entwined. For the character of Joe Bennett, the enigmatic, high-powered, complicated Prince Charming with a dark side, producers had to be looking for just the right combination of sexual appeal and sensitive undercurrent. They found the right guy when Andrew McCarthy was cast. The former Brat Packer could be the find of the TV season; the new McDreamy.
Being the hot commodity is nothing new for Andrew McCarthy. He was just 19 when he made his feature film debut in Class as Rob Lowe’s (Brothers and Sisters) prep school roomie who had a fling with Rob’s mom, Jacqueline Bisset. That was 1983; and just a couple of years later, McCarthy and Lowe were part of St. Elmo’s Fire, the quintessential Brat Pack movie. The Brat Pack was a group of attractive, young Hollywood stars seen as taking the industry by storm. McCarthy was a key component in other Brat Pack pics, like Pretty in Pink with Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer (Two and a Half Men) and James Spader (Boston Legal), and Less than Zero, again with Spader. But it may have been the goofy comedy Weekend at Bernie’s that brought him new fans, as did Mannequin with Kim Cattrall (pre-Sex & the City) and Spader once again. Both Bernie and Mannequin showed that McCarthy could be cute — and funny, too. Ironically, the films were bigger hits on video than in the theaters, and today are sort of cult classics.
Doing films and theater work occupied much of Andrew McCarthy’s career in the 1990’s, with an occasional foray into television. In 1991, he appeared and wrote an episode of Tales from the Crypt for HBO, and in 1996, he was directed by Sally Field (Brothers and Sisters) in an ABC holiday telefilm called The Christmas Tree. On the personal side, in 1999, he married his high school sweetheart, Carol Schneider, 20 years after they first dated.
McCarthy scored critically on Broadway in the Tony-winning play Side Man, and while in New York he did a Law and Order, then a Law and Order: SVU. But in 2003, something went awry and Andrew was fired from a gig on Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Producer Dick Wolf said McCarthy was responsible for a tiff with actor Vincent D’onofrio. McCarthy shot back, saying, “I was fired because I refused to allow a fellow actor to threaten me with physical violence, bully me and try to direct me.” Whatever the bad blood at the time, it’s now all in the past. Just last week, McCarthy starred in an episode of L&O: CI as an over-ambitious A.D.A.
TV has enjoyed more and more of Andrew McCarthy since 2000, although he was recently featured in Neil Labute’s off-Broadway play, Fat Pig with Jeremy Piven (Entourage), to critical acclaim. He starred in the CBS’s military drama E-Ring; guested as a killer on Monk; and had a memorable turn as Dr. Hook in the TV series based on Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital in 2004. In 2007, the actor signed for Lipstick Jungle after doing the big screen children’s film, The Spiderwick Chronicles.
Being an admirer of Sex & the City and Candace Bushnell, the creator of Lipstick Jungle, is what led him to take on the Joe Bennett character. He told reporter Troy Rogers, “I was a big fan of Candace’s sort of world and her voice. And I thought it was a really interesting show that treated women with a real regard, that I don’t see on television too much.”
As for the imperious Mr. Bennett, McCarthy said of his new character: “I think he’s just direct and follows his own sort of agendas without being encumbered by anything that society would put on him, because that’s what money does. It buys us freedom from having those constraints. But I guess we’ll just have to see where it unfolds, you know. I think that’s the thing about television until you - certain relationships and certain dynamics start to work, and so then they’re written for. And other ones work less well so they sort of phase out. And it’s just sort of a movable feast, always.”
Annabeth Gish Biography
As a juvenile actress, Gish gave a fine performance as a young girl caught between bomb testings and family feuds in the 1986 “sleeper” hit, “Desert Bloom”. She then played Julia Roberts’ sister in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) before taking time to earn a BA from Duke University. When she returned to Hollywood, she was a young leading lady with a porcelain complexion and winning smile.
Gish made “Desert Bloom” when she was 13, and, while still a teen, she portrayed the high school girl whom Jon Cryer, on the run from mobsters, romances in “Hiding Out” (1987). Since returning to films, Gish played the first wife of the young “Wyatt Earp” (1994), Julie Nixon in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995) and was in the ensemble casts of “Beautiful Girls” and “The Last Supper” (both 1996). In the former, she was Timothy Hutton’s girlfriend, a high-powered Manhattan attorney, while in the latter she was an idealistic left-wing student who joins others in killing right-wingers.
Her TV debut was in the 1986 ABC TV-movie “Hero in the Family”. Gish had her first lead in “When He’s Not a Stranger” (CBS, 1989) as a college freshman victimized by acquaintance rape and a college administration that wishes to make the incident disappear. In “Silent Cries” (NBC, 1993), she delivered a gritty portrayal of a young woman interned by the Japanese during World War II, while in the miniseries “Scarlett” (CBS, 1994) she was Anne Hampton, the wife Rhett Butler takes after his divorce from Scarlett O’Hara in the sequel to “Gone With the Wind”. Gish made her TV series debut in the 1995 CBS effort “Courthouse” as a young lawyer assigned to the sex crimes unit despite her discomfort with the area. Six years later, she joined the cast of Fox’s long-running “The X-Files” playing Agent Reyes.
- Born:
on 03/13/1971 in Albuquerque, New Mexico - Job Titles:
Actor
Significant Others
- Companion: Wade Allen. engaged as of September 2003; married on October 11, 2003
Education
- Duke University, North Carolina, English and theater, BA, 1993 (date approximate)
Milestones
- 1986 Feature debut, “Desert Bloom”
- 1986 TV-movie debut, “Hero in the Family”
- 1987 Starred in the teenage action comedy, “Hiding Out”
- 1988 Co-starred with Julia Roberts and Lili Taylor in the breakout hit “Mystic Pizza”
- 1994 Appeared in first miniseries, “Scarlett”
- 1995 TV series debut, “Courthouse”
- 1996 Appeared in two ensemble cast feature films, “Beautiful Girls” and “The Last Supper”
- 2000 Joined cast of Fox’s “The X-Files” in the recurring role of FBI agent Monica Reyes; made regular as of 2001-2002 season
- 2001 Featured opposite Frank Whaley in “Pursuit of Happiness”
- 2001 Had a recurring role as Special Agent Monica Reyes on the Fox drama, “The X Files”
- 2001 Starred in the VH-1 orginal film “The Way She Moves”
- 2003 Had a recurring role on NBC’s White House drama, “The West Wing”
- Started acting at age 8, appearing in several TV commericials