I’m always fascinating by random casting tidbits. I had a brief stint writing Time’s celebrity news page, and I always tried to make my editor run casting rumors that were unfounded and uninteresting and probably legally actionable. Now that I have a blog I can record the following:
— Zoe Saldana, who seems to occasionally spell her first name with an umlaut and her last with a tilda, has been cast as Uhura in the new Star Trek movie.
— Jim Broadbent has been cast in the small but crucial role of Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Broadbent – who’s one of those actors whose automatically good in everything — is rocking some serious late-life nerd cred, since he’s in both Narnia movies (he’s kindly Uncle Kirke) and Indy 4.
In other news, Philip K. Dick’s daughter is surprisingly normal-looking. Here’s her memory of going to see Blade Runner four months after her father died:
“I went with my mom and I remember that there were maybe two other people in the whole theater and that was the way it was everywhere — the movie was a total failure,” Isa Dick Hackett said. “I remember too that the lights came up before the dedication at the end, so I didn’t even get to see that. It was like a double slap in the face.”