Glourious Reunion as Basterds Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender Reunite on the Big Screen
Brad Pitt is hoping to give Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained the run of its life.
Nipping at the heels of his Inglourious Basterds helmer's upcoming slave revenge saga, the Hollywood star plans to produce and play a significant role in Twelve Years a Slave, a drama about a free black northerner in the 1850s who's abducted and sold into slavery in the deep south.
But as it happens, Twelve Years a Slave also marks a pair of notable reunions.
Per Indiewire.com, the film will not only reteam Pitt with his Inglourious comrade Michael Fassbender, but it will be helmed by indie auteur Steve McQueen, who directed the latter in the arthouse hit Hunger as well as the upcoming sex addiction tale Shame, which just got slapped with an NC-17 rating and unspools in December.
The underrated Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men) will essay the role of Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years' central character who, after being lured to Washington, D.C. by a fake job offer, is forced to work as a slave on various plantations. Hope arrives when a white Canadian carpenter-turned-abolitionist gets word on Northrup's behalf to his wife and she miraculously convinces a court to free him.
Pitt's Plan B shingle will oversee the project, which has been in development for years but didn't really gather momentum until catching the eye of Fassbender and McQueen.
Twelve Years, which starts shooting early next year, is the latest flick aiming to tackle America's Original Sin.
It follows Tarantino's May announcement that his next directorial effort will be Django Unchained, a Spaghetti-style western about a former slave (Jamie Foxx) who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to save his wife from an evil plantation owner. Kerry Washington is in talks to play the wife.