Jake Gyllenhaal To Continue His Illustrious Singing Career
Casting has been announced for the movie version of Damn Yankees, the baseball musical. Jake Gyllenhaal will sing! Also in casting news are Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, a Woody Allen movie, and Gossip Girl.
Jim Carrey will play the Devil who tempts die-hard Washington Senators fan Joe Boyd, who's sick of watching the Yankees win all the damn time, to sell him his soul in exchange for a victorious season. Carrey in that role makes sense. But Boyd, who magically becomes slugger Joe Hardy and helps the Senators win, will oddly, and sort of annoyingly, be played by noted rap video star Jake Gyllenhaal. His hip-hop career aside, Gyllenhaal's biggest brush with the musical was his disastrous (on purpose, I guess) "And I Am Telling You" warble when he hosted Saturday Night Live a while back. There's been nothing announced about the musical's most important part, the sexy vamp Lola (she gets what she wants) that the Devil uses to tempt Joe. May we suggest not Anne Hathaway. [Variety]
Will Ferrell and the always-hilarious Mark Wahlberg have been cast in The B Team, an action comedy directed by longtime Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay. The producers are working hard to nail down that title, as an adaptation of 80's wacka-wacka fest The A-Team is already in the works. [Variety]
In his continued efforts to one day assemble the world's absolute sexiest film cast, which could make the universe wink out of existence like a hard-bodied Large Hadron Collider, Woody Allen has nabbed Antonio Banderas to be in his next film, which already stars Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Slumdog Millionaire beauty Freida Pinto, and, um, Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film shoots in London and, every night, in the little smut movie house in Allen's head. [Variety]
The sometimes likable, other times irksome Seth Green has been cast in Robert Zemeckis' latest weirdo performance-capture movie, called Mars Needs Moms. He joins his Austin Powers mother Mindy Sterling, as well as Joan Cusack and Dan Fogler, the dude from Balls of Fury (and from the musical 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he won a Tony). [THR]
In TV, Brittany Snow has been cast as a young Lily van der Woodsen in that new Gossip Girl spin-off. Funny, we thought Snow's movie career was burgeoning. Also in television: Respectable actors Denis O'Hare and David Morse have been cast in TV pilots, and Jessica Capshaw now has a gig as a lesbian love interest on Grey's Anatomy. [EW, THR, EW]