Joel Edgerton Cast as 3-D Tom Buchanan
Man, Sam Worthington turns around for one second to do an indie drama and next thing he knows, someone has taken his spot as the unmemorable-looking Australian actor of choice to suddenly be in everything out of nowhere. That part now belongs to Joel Edgerton, who's just been cast as Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's needlessly-3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby.
Edgerton--who was up for the lead in the new Bourne film, and turned down the similarly high profile co-lead in Snow White and the Huntsman to instead shoot bin Laden with Kathryn Bigelow--replaces Ben Affleck in the part, and joins proven stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire on the male side of the Gatsby family. Luhrmann himself took the above photo of a cleanly-shaved Edgerton to show us how convincingly he can pull off that Buchanan stroke-squint, and said of the casting:
"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."
So, I think Edgerton also was just awarded Best in Age Group?
