It looks like Colin Farrell is keeping his “weird romance” streak going. Variety is reporting that the The Lobster star is closing in on a new role in Sofia Coppola’s remake of deeply skewed love/lust story The Beguiled, playing the role originated by Clint Eastwood in the 1971 original.
Directed by frequent Eastwood collaborator Don Siegel (just a few months before the duo would popularize the “loose cannon with a badge” branch of cop movies with Dirty Harry), the film sees a Southern boarding school for women become utterly disrupted by the arrival of a wounded Yankee soldier during the Civil War. Intended to break Eastwood out of his usual typecasting, the movie was a major flop in the U.S., with both Eastwood and Siegel attributing its failure to bad marketing on the part of Universal, and Clint Eastwood fans’ reluctance to see their stone-eyed hero get pushed around by a bunch of women. (According to Siegel, the film was based around “the basic desire of women to castrate men,” which might explain all the massive, long-barreled guns Eastwood spent the next decade of his career shoving into people’s faces.)
If he takes the part, Farrell would be playing that same soldier role in Coppola’s follow-up to 2013’s The Bling Ring. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Coppola’s old Marie Antoinette star Kirsten Dunst will play some of the women of the house, just itching to get their hands/machinations/sharp implements on Farrell’s poor, vulnerable junk.