Rooney Mara Replaces Blake Lively in Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects
Original casting of Lively cost Soderbergh financing on his picture, but that shouldn't be a problem now the recently Oscar nominated Mara is on board.
Just days after we heard that Steven Soderbergh had lost financing for his next thriller Side Effects over the casting of Blake Lively in the leading role, Deadline reports that Lively is gone and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo star Rooney Mara has replaced her. This will be Mara's first leading role since winning her Oscar nomination last week. Mara will play Emily Hawkins, a troubled, drug-addicted young woman who gets entangled in a love triangle with her doctor (Jude Law) and her soon to be paroled husband (Channing Tatum). She begins taking way more pills than she should to deal with her anxiety and depression, pills which unknowingly make her murder her husband and stand trial for his murder.The movie is said to be a study of how drugs affect the mind and has mighty supporting weight from husband & wife pairing Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas who both play some of Emily's other doctors. The film is based on an original screenplay from Soderbergh€™s The Informant and Contagion writer Scott Z. Burns. Soderbergh's film (said to be his penultimate before retiring) has a distributor in Open Road but lost it's financing after Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures disagreed over the casting of unproven box office draw Blake Lively in the leading role when Soderbergh was holding his ground firm. Now that he has replaced Lively with perhaps the most hot property female in Hollywood right now, perhaps Ellison will offer her money to him once again. Shooting is still said to be taking place in April in New York for a release next year.