Joel Kinnaman To Co-Lead ARTHUR & LANCELOT

Steven Soderbergh met with Joel Kinnaman, the Swedish star of Snabba Cash and lead of The Killing, to discuss the role of Illya Kuryakin in his adaptation of the 60s spy show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that is being turned into a large scale blockbuster at Warner Bros. Upon the meeting, Soderbergh made it known he wanted to cast the rising star but in the end Warner Bros have slotted him into co-leading another of their big money potential franchise starters. The Hollywood Reporter say Kinnaman will play Lancelot, the master swordsman and most trusted of King Arthur's "Knights of the Round Table" in the upcoming fantasy blockbuster Arthur & Lancelot, that begins filming in March. Kinnaman beat out Game of Thrones star Kit Harington who had also screentested for the role a few weeks back. Now as a big King Arthur junkie who once spent a few days exploring around Tintagel, Cornwall and countless other hours spent researching Arthur in a failed attempt to write my own screenplay for an LOTR style epic, there's definitely a more traditional adaptation of the Arthurian legend that would make a great movie with Kinnaman as Lancelot but sadly this one is not it. For some insane reason, despite movies like LOTR and t.v. shows like Game of Thrones and the popularity of Merlin and Camelot (though I hate both of those shows, but at least respect they went period) hinting that there's a huge audience for a grand scale, Arthurian epic, the plan is to contemporise the saga (yeah, seriously) and Wedding Crashes & The Change-Up comedy director David Dobkin, of all people, is helming the $90 million movie he wrote. For those keeping note, this is the project whose momentum killed both Bryan Singer and Guy Ritchie's separate and dueling attempts for a faithful King Arthur movie (both were partly remakes of John Boorman's 1981 movie Excalibur) made the right way at Warner Bros. but they were too busy with X-Men/Battlestar Galactica and Sherlock Holmes franchises respectively to move as quickly as WB wanted on it. So in a cinematic crime fit only for the high justice of the movie Gods, WB decided to kill both those projects and put their money on David Dobkin wielding the Sword in the Stone. Whoever at WB let that happen should be put strung up into the docks outside of Camelot for the peasants to throw cabbage at them. Here's how Dobkin explained his approach of essentially pissing on Arthur and turning it into something knew. Try your best not to puke;

€œI pulled the legend apart. I only kept a few things. I kept certain characters, I recreated the entire launch of the legend and why it starts the way that it starts, I don€™t want to give away too much but it€™s always had a flaw, I pulled the flaws out, I reinvented the characters as grounded characters. I took a much more realistic and grounded approach towards everybody, you know, why would this character be this way and why would this character be that way? You know Arthur€™s superpower is compassion and vision. I will tell you this, the whole thing is wrapped around the birth of democracy as a concept and it€™s positing Arthur as the first man to say all men are created equal.€

Arthur & Lancelot sounds like a misguided adaptation but a great role for Kinnaman in a high-profile picture that will add to his blossoming resume which also includes David Fincher's dark adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. He steps into the shoes of the likes of Robert Taylor (Knights of the Round Table 1953), Franco Nero (Camelot 1967), Nicholas Clay (Excalibur 1981), Richard Gere (First Knight, 1995) and Ioan Gruffudd (King Arthur 2004) in the famous literary role that no actor has truly claimed as their own yet on screen. He will now screen test with a number of actors to see who he has the best chemistry with to play Arthur. Those who have been circling the film include the aforementioned Harington and;

Sam Claflin (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides), Dominic Cooper (The Devil's Double), Hans Matheson (Sherlock Holmes), and Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) in the UK and Ben Walker and Liam Hemsworth in the U.S.

Personally I think Ben Walker has the leadership beyond his years quality (he's playing Abraham Lincoln next year for God's sake) to play Arthur, although there's a nagging thought in the back of my head he should be played by a Brit. Shooting is set to begin early next year for a release March 15th, 2013.