10 Actors Who Are About To Make A Huge Comeback

It could be confidently argued that Sean Penn is one of the most talented actors of his generation. Films such as Carlito's Way, Mystic River, and Milk are all proof of that. The only problem is that these films are kind of old now, and Penn hasn't turned in anything memorable for at least ten years.

Which makes 2017 the perfect year for the actor to return to the big screen with something to impress us with. Rather bizarrely, the film he's chosen to do that with is an adaptation of the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne titled The Professor and the Madman, which concerns - wait for it - the creation of the first dictionary.

Oh, and it also stars Mel Gibson as James Murray, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Penn, on the other hand, will play William Chester Minor, a former army surgeon confined to jail for committing murder, who also ends up submitting 10,000 entries to the OED (yes, this is a very strange picture).

It's a project that sounds so nutty that it's bound to end up as a delirious masterpiece of sorts, especially with John Boorman on script duties. No doubt this will be the film to put Penn - and perhaps even Gibson - back on the map.