After becoming famous for becoming the grouchy and morally complex Dr. House on Fox's House, Hugh Laurie has shed what used to be a career in comedy, and now seems poised to take on his biggest bad guy role yet. He's in talks to join Tomorrowland, the Brad Bird-directed Disney project that already has George Clooney on board in the lead role.
Because we don't know much at all about Tomorrowland-- that Brad Bird loves his secrecy!-- there's no detail on what Laurie's role might be, with THR only willing to call him the antagonist. Bird will be directing from a script by former Lost show runner Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen, an editor at Entertainment Weekly. Lindelof also comes by his love of secrecy honest, having worked on the J.J. Abrams-produced Lost and then put in work on Prometheus, which contained plenty of twists kept secret until it opened-- though how well those twists worked out is up for debate.
All this secrecy hasn't kept a lot of fans from speculating, of course. On Monday we dug into a theory from Disney historian Jim Hill, who thinks the film might be about a supposedly real effort to get Walt Disney to make films helping Americans adjust to the idea of aliens-- since the Disney name might make an alien invasion feel like a spirited adventure rather than a catastrophic nightmare. We can see Laurie as a government official stepping on Disney's toes… but that makes Clooney as Disney, right?
It's hard to know if the actual film can live up to the fun of these wild theories, but we'll there opening day to find out for ourselves either way.
