Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Call it one of those lucky bits of reluctance on my part. I’ve been burned by running things that were heavily rumored, as has pretty much anyone doing this sort of thing at least once. In this case, I was holding off on reporting that Ethan Embry was set to play Nightcrawler, the coolest new character in the upcoming sequel X-MEN 2. It didn’t jibe with something I’d heard, and it didn’t seem appropriate for the age of the character in the script. Tonight, when I got home from seeing a restored print of MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE over at the Fairfax Odeon, MaxwellSmart in our chat steered me to the web, telling me that the Embry rumor had been proven false. The story broke earlier tonight on The Comics Continuum... it wasn’t true. Somehow, something had been announced prematurely or discussions had been mistaken for something more. Whatever the case, Ethan Embry most assuredly was not aboard as Nightcrawler.
Leave it to Michael Fleming at VARIETY.
He managed to break the story that Alan Cumming, from EYES WIDE SHUT and SPY KIDS and THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY, has signed on to give life to Kurt Wagner, a long-time circus performer who finds himself drawn into the lives of the X-Men when he falls under the control of mysterious forces and is used to try to kill the President of the United States.
In my script review of X-MEN 2, I talked about how excited I was by the character overall. The fact that Bryan Singer and his producers have also recruited Aaron Stanford, star of this year’s Sundance hit TADPOLE, to play Pyro, one of the other major new additions to the cast, bodes well. It’s a smaller role, but important, and they’re obviously chasing quality actors across the board.
I was able to discuss this film, along with many others, at length on Friday night with Kevin Feige and Avi Arad when I was... well, you’ll just have to wait until later today to see what I was doing when we had that conversation. Trust me... it’s worth checking back for.
Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
