We’ve been hearing rumors and negotiations for months, but now the cast for the upcoming Ender’s Game adaptation is locked in, and it looks great, especially for a small studio with a small budget.
We’d previously gotten confirmation of Asa Butterfield in the lead role, Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rakham, and True Grit star Hailee Steinfeld as Petra Arkanian. Now we know that Abigale Breslin (known best, perhaps, for her role in Zombieland) will play Valentine Wiggin, Jimmy Pinckak (Let Me In) will play Peter Wiggin, and Harrison Ford has completed negotiations to take the role of Colonel Graff.
In addition, a number of smaller roles have been filled:
Bean … Aramis Knight
Dink … Khylin Rhambo
Bonzo … Moises Arias
Stilson … Brendan Meyer
Bernard … Conor Carroll
Alai … Suraj Parthasarathy
This cast is, by necessity filled with mostly untried children, a dangerous proposition for any film, especially one which is not necessarily a children’s story (if they stick to the novel, some of these children are terrible people, and a couple of them get gruesomely murdered), but the leads are some of the most talented children in the industry.
We’ll see if Gavin Hood at the helm as the writer and director of the film can pull all of them together to make something great. If well done it could become one of the great classic science fiction films of our time, but it’s not a challenge undertaken lightly, or with inadequate resources.
If there are no delays or scheduling conflicts, I think we can expect filming to begin in the spring.
Ender’s Game has a tentative release date of 15 March 2013.
