After a month of dealing with some very bizarre issues, including the director not showing up for the first day of production and multiple actors dropping out, it finally seems as though Gavin O'Conner's Jane Got A Gun is finally back on track - and it took a Star Wars connection to get it there.
According to Deadline, Ewan McGregor has taken over for Bradley Cooper as the villain in the upcoming western, reuniting him with Natalie Portman for the first time since Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. In the film, based on an original script by Anthony Tambakis and Brian Duffield, Portman will play the wife of a outlaw (Noah Emmerich) who is forced to call upon an ex-lover (Joel Edgerton) when the husband's former gang arrives at her farm looking for blood.
Originally, the antagonist part was going to be played by Edgerton, but he ended up moving over to the hero role when Michael Fassbender left the project before the start of production. Jude Law was then cast as the bad guy, but left the project when director Lynne Ramsay failed to show up for work, the actor citing that he only signed on to work with her. Bradley Cooper was then brought in, but due to production delays on David O. Russell's American Hustle he was unavailable and also had to drop out. Deadline notes that the silver lining in this whole situation is that the villain character isn't meant to show up until late in production anyway.
McGregor was most recently seen in Bryan Singer's Jack The Giant Slayer, and later this year will be seen as part of the impressive ensemble cast of John Wells' August: Osage County.
