Gollum replaces former Dr. Who in John Landis' BURKE & HARE!
Andy Serkis & Simon Pegg to appear in the real life Sweeney Todd esque tale of murder!
A now deleted tweet from Simon Pegg has revealed that Gollum himself Andy Serkis has replaced fellow Brit actor David Tennant in Burke & Hare - the Hammer Horror style black comedy that centers on a pair of Irish immigrants who took to murdering their tenants "Sweeney Todd style" when they needed cash. The pair would sell off the bodies of their 17 victims to the Edinburgh Medical College who used them for medical dissections. We presume the tweet was deleted because Pegg wasn't supposed to make the announcement just yet as it isn't quite official. Here's what Pegg said yesterday...
David Tennant had to drop out of B&H but by sheer glorious serendipity a legend of Middle Earth and Skull Island has come aboard. Welcome AS.
Sad to see Tennant leave the project as I'm curious to see how his transition to movies post-Dr. Who goes - but Serkis is always a delight on screen, and suits this tone more. His role in the small time British horror The Cottage last year is possibly a nice pre-cursor to what we can expect from Serkis here. As exciting as a Pegg/Serkis team-up is, it's cranked up by about a thousand when you remember that John Landis (American Werewolf in London, Blues Brothers) is directing, helming his first feature movie in over ten years. It's just the icing on the cake that it's the kind of material we know he eats, drinks and breathes. The great thing about Burke & Hare's story is that it's as fascinating as Jack the Ripper, and Sweeney Todd - but as yet, hasn't been told that much on screen. What started as a fairly harmless way of making a quick buck by selling off the body of a tenant who owed Burke money for rent and had died of natural causes - quickly spiralled into a greed lust, as the pair moved onto knocking off the sick and then friends, family and anyone they could find off the street. 
Burke & Hare sold the bodies to an ambitious anatomist at Edinburgh university by the name of Dr. Robert Knox (pictured above) who knew what the pair were up to, and by all accounts encouraged it as corpses for medical research were becoming harder and harder to come by. Bill Nighy and John Cleese are both said to have supporting roles in Landis' picture - so we guess one of those will be playing the Doctor part. Simon Pegg (as Burke), Andy Serkis (as Hare) star. Other supporting parts are filled by Bill Bailey (as Angus), Ronnie Corbett!! (as Captain McLintock), Pollyanna McIntosh (as Mary), the great David Schofield (as Fergus) and then there's even someone playing Charles Darwin (Christian Brassington). As I say, the kind of cast the Hammer studio's were built on! Filming should begin on Landis' movie sometime this year.