The casting for the reboot of Total Recall, or the more adaptation accurate rendition of it if you prefer, has been moving along with shooting getting into gear and the casting having a lot of talk but little in the way of concrete other than Colin Farrell taking on the role formerly performed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. That changed today as the casting firmed up from in talks to formally taken on for Jessica Biel, Kate Beckinsale and… Bill Nighy?
Kate Beckinsale has signed on to the project, though it wasn’t too much of a surprise once it was learned that she was in talks for it, since her husband Len Wiseman is the director for it. Beckinsale will take on the role of Lori while Jessica Biel has signed on the dotted line for the other lead female role of Melina. As previously reported, filming was set to start in May in Toronto and it appears that they’re going in front of the cameras this coming Monday.
In addition to this casting, it appears that Bill Nighy will also be joining the cast as he’s taking on the role of the leader of the resistance as Quatto. They’ll be joining the already cast Farrel and Bryan Cranston who is playing the main villain. There’s also the cameo by Ethan Hawke who it seems as though will be providing a lengthy speech that will be used in the film.
Total Recall made lots of money back whe nit first came out in 1990, but it diverged heavily from the original source material novel by Phillip K. Dick. This one will follow it more closely as Farrel’s character begins to believe he’s a spy for either the nation stat Euromerica or New Shanghai, but he doesn’t know which.
Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with Wiseman earlier in the year and had this to say about the kind of world they were creating. “I think the world that Len Wiseman is creating is incredible. It’s a real world, a real future world, where the cities have just gotten so overcrowded that the cities are just built up, up, up, up. It’s just everything I see on the movie, every pre-vis I see on the movie, every conceptual drawing on this movie that I see just makes me more and more excited. We’re playing it like a real world, but there’s all these technological advancements to the real world, and it’s just really cool. It’s an awesome movie. I’m dying—as a fan of movies, more than anything, it’s a movie that I’m just dying to see.”
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