Casting Bits: ‘Attack the Block’ Star in HBO’s ‘Da Brick’, Rachel Boston in ‘It’s a Disaster’, Harry Lloyd in ‘Closer to the Moon’

Posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 by Angie Han

If you happened to catch a screening of Attack the Block this summer, you probably walked away thinking the same thing we did: this John Boyega kid is going to be a huge star. Well, Boyega’s now landed his first part since Attack the Block opened, and it sounds like a great one. He’ll play the lead, Donnie, in HBO’s series Da Brick, a fictionalized telling of the earliest days of Mike Tyson‘s boxing career. Spike Lee is set to direct the pilot episode from a script by John Ridley (Three Kings), and will also executive produce along with Tyson, Ridley, Jim Lefkowitz, and Entourage creator Doug Ellin.

Da Brick centers around a young man in modern-day Newark, NJ who gets released from juvenile detention on his 18th birthday. The series will aim to deal with larger issues like “what it means to be a young, black man in supposedly post-racial America” and “what it means to be a man both for himself, and to those around him.” As long as the British Boyega can pull off a convincing Jersey accent, this seems like pitch-perfect casting. [Deadline]

After the jump, In Plain Sight‘s Rachel Boston faces a possible apocalypse with Julia Stiles and America Ferrera, and Harry Lloyd, a.k.a. Viserys Targaryen, joins Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong in Closer to the Moon.

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Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong Cast in ‘Closer to the Moon’

Posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 by Russ Fischer

Briefly: Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong are going to Romania. The two have just been cast in a period story set in the country’s communist era. Closer to the Moon will feature the two actors in a politically-charged and strange-sounding tale that, given the insanity that reportedly took place in some Easern Bloc countries during the communist years, could almost be true.

Mark Strong will be Max Rosenthal, once a Bucharest cop and leader of a criminal investigation unity. He and four other men, all Jews, rob a bank right under the nose of onlookers, using a great cover story: “we’re shooting a movie!” (Cinematic immunity to the rescue, as always.) The crew is captured, tried and sentenced to death, with the strict sentence derived in part from their Jewish heritage. But before being killed they have to re-enact their heist for a government propaganda film. Farmiga will be “Max’s former lover and mother of his child, who returns from studying in Moscow as the drama unfolds.”

Nae Caranfil (The Rest is Silence, Philanthropy) will direct; we don’t know the screenwriter at this point. [Deadline]

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