There’s been a bit of a casting shakeup in Guillermo Del Toro’s upcoming haunted house thriller Crimson Peak. Alice In Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska will be taking over the lead role Emma Stone had originally been attached to. Stone apparently departed the project last month when a scheduling conflict could not be resolved. Wasikowska’s reps are currently hammering out her deal with the project’s producers Legendary Pictures.
Wasikowska will be playing Edith Cushing, a recently married writer who discovers that her husband is not at all what he seems to be. Benedict Cumberbatch, Jessica Chastain and del Toro’s Pacific Rim co-star Charlie Hunnam have already been hired for the film.
Both Wasikowska and Stone are competent actors, so I don’t think there will be much of an impact on the final film, though as a fan of Emma Stone’s I am sorry to see her go.
Crimson Peak is a project that has been on Del Toro’s backburner for a while now. He first wrote and then sold the screenplay to Universal back in 2007 after he had completed Pan’s Labyrinth. The chance to do Hellboy II and then the two years in New Zealand he spent working on developing The Hobbit with Peter Jackson kept him from doing the film for the studio. More recently, Del Toro was asked by Legendary what he would like to do as his next project and he sent them the scripts to his long in-development adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness (which Universal had also shown a brief interest in), an adaptation of The Count Of Monte Cristo he had been trying to get going for nearly 20 years and Crimson Peak and was pleasantly surprised when they came back with Peak as the project they wanted to finance.
Via The Wrap.
