Jessica Chastain, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong have just been added to the cast of Kathryn Bigelow's thriller about the Navy Seal Team 6 who took down Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in an incredibly daring mission earlier this year. The film was initially going by the title Kill Bin Laden but is now untitled. The trio of high profile actors join Jason Clarke, Chris Pratt and lead Joel Edgerton and it's something of a surprising cast. When the film was first announced I expected that it would feature no-names with Edgerton just about the only familiar face because of the sense that if you add movie stars in these roles it may glorify the Navy Seals members in a way that some may deem offensive. But having said that, if Bigelow were to cast unknowns, then those young actors would have the stigma of being seen as the surrogate actual Navy Seal Team because the real identities are classified and that could be too much for those thesps to ever overcome that in their careers. In any event, Edgerton, Chastain, Ramirez, Strong, Clarke & Pratt is the cast, according to Deadline. There had been some conjecture over Edgerton's schedule but Variety says those problems have been ironed out. Written by Mark Boal (writer of Bigelow's The Hurt Locker) initially as a movie about the first search for Bin Laden in the Tora Mountains post-9/11, the script went through a radical change in the summer when history played its card and Bin Laden was found and killed. Joel Edgerton told The Playlist earlier;
"The attempt to kill Bin laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 was no longer as relevant a story as what had just happened, but then what had just happened was so fresh and as we all know, history often needs time and perspective to kind of settle in everybodys minds, you cant just go and start shooting the movie in the next month and assume that youre going to get everything right and have all of the information. So the project was put on hold for a while while Mark and Kathryn kind of gathered information..."
The movie will film next month for a release this December and you can expect the rest of the cast to be locked up in the coming weeks. The likes of Rooney Mara (who has had to decline the chance to star in the film because of extensive press duties on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (yeah seriously, somewhere she is still doing this), Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Jennifer Ehle and Nina Arianda have been linked with the movie in the past but the more familiar names seem unlikely. Kathryn Bigelow's untitled thriller will open December 9th, 2012.