'Boyhood' Star Ellar Coltrane Joins James Ponsoldt's 'The Circle'

Boyhood breakout Ellar Coltrane has finally booked his first grown-up movie role. He's set to star in James Ponsoldt's technological thriller The Circle, alongside a star-studded cast that also includes Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. Get more details on the Ellar Coltrane The Circle casting after the jump. THR broke the Ellar Coltrane The Circle news. Based on the novel by Dave Eggers, the film follows a recent college grad named Mae (Watson) who books a job at a cutting-edge tech corporation called The Circle. As she gets deeper into the company, she faces disturbing questions about privacy, transparency, and democracy in the modern age.

Coltrane will play Mae's ex-boyfriend, who tries to go off the grid. Or rather off the Circle, which combines users' email, social media, banking, and purchasing accounts into a single online identity. It seems like appropriate casting. One notable scene in Boyhood saw Coltrane's character Mason going on an anti-Facebook rant, which reportedly came out of an essay Coltrane wrote himself.

As previously reported, Hanks plays a mysterious older man Kalden, John Boyega is boy-wonder visionary Ty, Karen Gillian is Mae's friend and co-worker Annie, and Patton Oswalt is an '80s Wall Street-type businessman.

The Circle won't be Coltrane's first non-Boyhood role — he's appeared in Lone Star State of Mind and Linklater's Fast Food Nation, among other things — but it's the first he's booked since Boyhood came out. Shooting on The Circle is already underway in the Los Angeles area. No release date has been set.

Here's the synopsis for Eggers' book:

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company's modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can't believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.