British actress Samantha Barks is set to co-star in Universal Pictures’ Dracula, an origins story about the world’s first and most infamous vampire. She joins Sarah Gadon (Amazing Spider-Man 2), Dominic Cooper (Devil’s Double), Charlie Cox (“Boardwalk Empire”) and Luke Evans as the Count.
Dracula tells the story of a Transylvanian prince who becomes the first vampire to save his wife and child from a Turkish horde, subjecting his soul to eternal damnation. According to THR, Barks will play a baba yaga, a beautiful young woman capable of transforming into a savage witch.
Dracula is Barks first horror film. Her big break came last year in Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables.
Full Moon Entertainment released today on Redbox its new Charles Band-directed horror-comedy Unlucky Charms, starring Disney’s Tiffany Thornton (“Sonny with a Chance”), Alex Rose Wiesel (Switched at Birth), pin-up model Masuimi Max and Playboy Playmates Anna Sophia Berglund and Nikki Leigh (pictured).
Unlucky Charms tells the story of five hot chicks competing to win a spokesmodel gig for a high-end lingerie company. Making the competition more cutthroat are the group of creepy leprechauns running amok (exactly what “America’s Next Top Model” was missing).
Russian actress Svetlana Khodchenkova can currently be seen playing sexy villainess Viper in director James Mangold’s The Wolverine. The role, however, was originally meant for Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Total Recall star Jessica Biel.
As if Biel’s absence from the film weren’t bad enough, artist Joshua Min has now posted on his blog the early character concept art for Viper, depicting a naked Biel looking all hot and sticky while shedding her skin (posted above).
No offense to Khodchenkova, but it feels like we lost something when Biel passed on the role. Oh, well, there’s always Powder Blue… actually, this could just as easily been concept art for her character in that movie.
“Rome” and “Human Target” alumna Indira Varma is set to star in season four of HBO’s critically acclaimed fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” Varma will play Ellaria Sand, the sexually adventurous mother of Prince Oberyn Martell’s (AKA The Red Viper) four bastard daughters.
EW reports that the new season will find Ellaria accompaning Prince Oberyn (Pedro Pascal) to King’s Landing to avenge the murder of his sister by the Lannister clan.
Varma made her acting and nude debuts in 1996’s erotic drama Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. She is best known for her role as Niobe, the wife of rogue Roman soldier Lucius Vorenus on HBO’s historical drama “Rome” and for recurring as billionaire widow Ilsa Pucci on Fox’s shortlived action show “Human Target.”
Magnolia Pictures has acquired U.S. rights to How I Live Now, an apocalyptic thriller from director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), starring Saoirse Ronan (Hanna) as an American teenager whose visit to the U.K. and love affair with a boy is like totally disrupted by war. Bummer!
Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles describes the film as:
Grandly scaled, beautifully crafted, with a terrific performance from the always great Saoirse Ronan, How I Live Now is equally successful as a tense apocalyptic thriller and a great teenage romance.
How I Live Now is based on English writer Meg Rosoff’s 2004 young-adult novel of the same name. Magnolia is eyeballing a fall release for the film through its Magnet Releasing shingle. Ronanis coming off Open Road’s The Host, an adaptation of Stephenie Meyers’ teen sci-fi novel.
ABC has cast kiwi actress Rose McIver to play Tinker Bell in season three of its fairytale series “Once Upon a Time,” returning Sept. 29. The new season will find Snow White, Prince Charming and their grown daughter Emma Swan heading off to Neverland to rescue Bella’s son from a sinister Peter Pan.
Producer Adam Horowitz teased the Tinker Bell character at SDCC, suggesting that she, like Pan, will be a darker character than people have known her to be in the past.
Horowitz said:
It’s taking an icon and putting our spin on it. How we introduce her, and who she is, is hopefully going to be surprising because we’re going to find she has a surprising connection to someone.
McIver played Ranger Yellow Summer Landsdown on the kid show “Power Rangers: RPM” and made her feature film debut opposite Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan in Peter Jackson’s 2009 murder mystery The Lovely Bones.
XLrator Media has released the first trailer for The Banshee Chapter, a mind-bending thriller from actor/producer Zachary Quinto’s Before the Door Pictures shingle, starring Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs), Michael McMillian (“True Blood”) andSwedish stunner Katia Winter (”Dexter”).
The Banshee Chapter follows a female journalist as she searches for a friend who has gone missing after experimenting with “mind-altering chemicals developed in secret government drug tests.” The film, based on true accounts, is described as “a fast-paced blend of fact and fiction.”
“Mistresses” star Shannyn Sossamon has said I do to playing Matt Dillon’s wife in “Wayward Pines,” a ten-episode mystery thriller from Chad Hodge (”Playboy Club”) and M. Night Shyamalan, based on the Blake Crouch novel of the same name.
“Wayward Pines” follows Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Dillon) on assignment to find two missing federal agents in the Idaho town of Wayward Pines. What he discovers instead are mysterious and sinister happenings that threaten the very core of who he is as a person.
Sossamon joins a cast that includes stunner Carla Gugino (Sin City), Academy Award-winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Terence Howard (Iron Man) and Toby Jones (The Girl). The series is penned by Hodge and is slated to debut in 2014.
Jamie Babbit’s Breaking the Girls, a lesbian re-imagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller Strangers On a Train, is in theaters today. Madeline Zima (“Californication”) and Agnes Bruckner (The Pact) star as friends who agree to kiss and make-out with each other while plotting how to off the others enemies.
Reviews have not been kind for Breaking the Girls, but being that its written by American Psycho scribe Guinevere Turner and helmed by Babbit, who directed Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle in the highly underrated psych-thriller The Quiet, I still plan to grab my penis loved one and go see it.
“Hung” star Rebecca Creskoff is checking into season two of A&E’s superb new drama “Bates Motel,” a present-day prequel series to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, produced by Carlton Cuse (“LOST”) and Kerry Ehrin (”Friday Night Lights”).
“Bates Motel” follows an emotionally unstable Norman Bates and his controlling mother Norma as they attempt to start new lives and a motel business in the small fictional town of White Pine Bay, Oregon. The show premiered in March to positive reviews from critics and fans alike.
Creskoff will play Norma’s first female friend in White Pine Bay. Also new this season are Michael Vartan (“Alias”) as Norma’s love interest, Kenny Johnson (“Sons of Anarchy”) as her estranged older brother and Michael Eklund (The Call) as a high ranking member of the town’s drug traffickers.
Production on season two of “Bates Motel” starts this week.
