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CASTING WATCH

Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave: Brad Pitt To Star with Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor

We knew that Plan B was producing Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave, but we didn’t know that main man Brad Pitt would take on a role in the period drama, alongside Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor. This project just keeps sounding better. The idea of Fassbender and Pitt together in the same film is almost too good to be true; let’s hope further casting updates on this project are as promising.
The Tree of Life team of Bill Pohlad’s River Road and Patrick Wachsberger’s Summit International will co-produce; Summit will handle foreign pre-sales at November’s American Film Market.
More information on Twelve Years A Slave (from our earlier story) below:
Following Hunger and Shame, Fassbender and McQueen will bring to life the true story of Solomon Northup (Ejiofor), a citizen of New York who was kidnapped and enslaved in 1841, before being saved from a Louisiana cotton plantation twelve years later.
Fassbender will presumably play the Canadian carpenter who frees him. McQueen co-wrote the script with John Ridley off Northup’s 1853 memoir. Plan B is producing and CAA is arranging financing. Even if McQueen and Fassbender don’t receive Awards love this season for the transgressive, graphic and full frontal—and now officially NC-17—Shame, they’re moving forward with another potential powerhouse; Twelve Years A Slave is gearing up to shoot in early 2012.