This time next year we may be looking at Joel Edgerton as that year’s Michael Fassbender the way Michael Fassbender is this year’s Tom Hardy. Confused? Don’t worry, just follow the trail of breadcrumbs and you’ll be okay.
Joel Edgerton may be an unknown commodity in Hollywood at the moment, despite being in big-budget movies like two Star Wars prequels, where he played Luke Skywalker’s uncle, and King Arthur, where he played Sir Gawain, but from out of nowhere (actually, due to the success of Animal Kingdom) he’s being rumored for multiple starring roles which had included The Bourne Legacy, a spin-off of the Jason Bourne series, which he eventually lost to Jeremy Renner.
But now the actor, who will appear this fall in the MMA drama Warrior alongside Tom Hardy, has got a strong supporting role in Baz Lurhmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He’ll play Tom Buchanan, East Egg millionaire and married to Daisy Buchanan. He joins the already impressive looking cast of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Isla Fisher as Myrtle (Tom’s mistress), and Australian newcomer Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker.
About the casting of Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, director Luhrmann remarked, “In casting Tom one had to find an actor who could credibly be (as Fitzgerald describes him) ‘one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,’ had five-star acting chops and in the big dramatic showdown scenes between Gatsby and Tom, hold the screen against Leonardo DiCaprio, in the appropriate age group. Any wonder, it has been a long and thorough journey. The simple truth is that Joel came into our rehearsal space in New York and fulfilled all of the above criteria, and then some.”
What this means: Considering that Edgerton is taking the part that was to have gone to Ben Affleck until a scheduling conflict (directing Argo for Warner Bros.) got in the way, this could be a monumental break for the Australian actor. It’s almost reminiscent of when Hugh Jackman, another Aussie, got the call to play Wolverine in X-Men when initial choice, Dougray Scott, had a scheduling conflict with the film Mission: Impossible II and had to pull out.
Director Baz Lurhmann, whose last few features have been produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox, will make The Great Gatsby for Warner Bros., and it will be released in 3D.
