When you’ve got a heavy generation-spanning drama about a mentally ill novelist, it would be a shame to just fill it with one Oscar-winning actor – in this case, Russell Crowe. Voltage Pictures’ upcoming Fathers and Daughters has fixed that problem by adding Best Supporting Actress Octavia James (The Help), Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Diane Kruger (Inglorious Basterds) to its cast. With The Pursuit of Happyness’ Gabriele Muccino directing, this is one that will probably find its way to an awards show near you in 2015.
Crowe, who is also serving as Fathers and Daughters’ executive producer, will play a brain-marred novelist and widower trying to figure out how to raise a 5-year-old daughter in New York City in 1988. Twenty-five years later, Amanda Seyfried plays the grown-up daughter who is still trying to outlast the problems that comprised her tumultuous childhood, all while in a romance with Aaron Paul.
According to Variety, Spencer will star as the head of a psychiatric clinic where Seyfried works with troubled children. Wallis will play one of Seyfried’s patients that hasn’t uttered a syllable in the year since her mother was murdered. Finally, Kruger will play Crowe’s sister-in-law, who believes that he is to blame for her sister’s death.
There is drama all over the place with this one, and the screenplay written by Brad Desch was one of the entries on the 2012 Black List (the annual list of the most popular unproduced screenplays in Hollywood). Most of the places that one reads about it all refer to the film as a love story between a father and his daughter, but it sounds more like a film that involves more skeletons in the closet than love. But I’m sure it’ll get there in the end.
Spencer had a pretty giant 2013 with starring roles in Fruitvale Station, Lost on Purpose, and Diablo Cody’s directorial debut Paradise> She even voiced a snake in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters. She’ll next be seen in Snowpiercer, assuming it ever comes out, Mike Binder’s custody drama Black and White and the James Brown biography Get On Up. She’s currently filming Adam Collis’ comedy Car Dogs (how's that not an animated movie?)
Wallis, following a bit role in 12 Years a Slave, is now finished filming Will Gluck’s upcoming Annie remake and will voice a character in the upcoming multi-director animated adaptation The Prophet. Kruger, who recently starred in Andrew Niccol’s The Host, has been killing it as the awkward asocial Sonya in the Americanized version of The Bridge on FX. She’ll next play Abraham Lincoln’s older sister Sarah in A.J. Edwards’ biographical drama The Better Angels.
Fathers and Daughters will be heading to Berlin’s European Film Market later this month, and is setting up its pre-production in Pittsburgh, otherwise known as the "New York City of Pennsylvania."
