Returning to the sediments and bodily fluids that first rendered him a star, Russell Crowe has signed on to play the lead in the new historical epic In Sand And Blood. The film—not to be confused with Spartacus: Blood And Sand, a now-concluded Starz series, or BloodSand: The Rise Of Mummy Dracula, a movie we just made up—will star Crowe as 19th-century American sea captain James Riley, who was shipwrecked off the western coast of Africa and forced to use trickery and guile to deliver himself and his crew safely across the desert. The film’s script, written by Public Enemies’ Ronan Bennett, is based off of Dean King’s non-fiction book Skeletons on the Zahara, a tale of peril so fraught with scarcity that they ran out of S’s halfway through writing the title.
Crowe recently directed his first film, The Water Diviner, and is currently starring in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling. There’s no word yet on who he’ll be starring with on In Sand And Blood, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that any of his female co-stars are cast age-appropriately, since Russell Crowe—a 51-year-old man playing a sea captain who was 38 when his ship was wrecked—hates when people try to play roles outside their proper age.