When you have a star like George Clooney leading your film, the supporting cast could be made up of origami geese and the film would probably still be a hit. Fortunately, though, Brad Bird’s upcoming throwback adventure film Tomorrowland will be full of human beings, some playing robots. After narrowing down the lead female role to two actresses last month, Bird and his Disney team are sending Britt Robertson into the past. Or the future. Or whenever.
Robertson beat out the Disney Channel friendly actress Naomi Scott for the role of Casey Newton (assuming that’s still her name), and the press release even give a very brief plot description that rewords the slight plotline we were already familiar with. Robertson will play “a high school girl with an unconventional understanding of technology” who “is launched on a journey to reclaim her future.” She somehow ropes Clooney’s inventor character into helping her. (Probably using something he invented. Call me crazy.)
Robertson, whose name flips from Britt to Brittany depending on what she’s in, has mostly been visible on the TV side of things throughout her career, with smaller parts in films such as Scream 4 and Dan in Real Life. But in the last few years, she’s starred in the CW series Life Unexpected and The Secret Circle. Most recently, however, she’s taken the role of Angie in CBS’ hit adaptation of Stephen King’s Under the Dome. At this point in that series, she’s mostly been wasted as a hostage chained to a bed, but that may change soon.
On the cinematic side, the most high profile film she’ll be seen in is Ken Scott’s Delivery Man with Vince Vaughn, but she also has the disturbing-sounding drama White Rabbit coming from Tim McCann, and the Allison Burnett drama Undiscovered Gyrl, which she’ll star in opposite Justin Long.
There’s no doubt that starring in a Brad Bird film will vault her into the upper echelon of young actresses. This is the guy that made a film about an Iron Giant one of the most beautiful films of our time, so I’m pretty sure the nostalgia-driven Tomorrowland will do the same for these characters. A former Pixar director, Bird's first human-led film was 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and while that was a badass film, it wasn’t nearly as whimsical as the films his animation pedigree has led fans to expect from him.
Tomorrowland was written by the notoriously secretive Damon Lindelof of Lost and Star Trek Into Darkness fame, and while he offered some background to the film’s story, we’re pretty much left with what I mentioned above, with the added knowledge that Hugh Laurie plays the villain, and young actress Raffey Cassidy plays a robot. Not exactly a wealth of information to go on.
But there’s still almost a year and a half until the film hits theaters on December 12, 2014. Until then, check out Robertson on Under the Dome on theshow’s CBS website.
