Hugh Grant Makes the Wachowskis’ ‘Cloud Atlas’ Sound as If It Will be Amazing

The film is Cloud Atlas, based on the novel by David Mitchell in which we meet a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer living a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilization.

The story follows each of these souls across time and how that idea will be turned into a cohesive narrative is beyond me. Granted, it’s likely it runs around two-and-a-half-hours or so, but even then, it seems like a grand undertaking for Andy and Lana Wachowski along with co-director Tom Tykwer. Then to hear Hugh Grant discuss his six roles in the film. Here’s what he told Empire:

“I have six cameo parts in this strange, ambitious film. I do a lot of killing and raping. I wear an awful lot of prosthetic make up, too. You probably won’t know that I am in the film! But it was a laugh.

“In one of the parts I am a cannibal, about 2000 years in the future, and I thought, ‘I can do that. It’s easy.’ And then I am suddenly standing in a cannibal skirt on a mountaintop in Germany and they are saying, ‘You know, hungry! We must have that flesh-eating, like a leopard who is so hungry…’ and I am thinking, ‘I can’t do that! Just give me a witty line!'”

I love that last line, but beyond that, everything he’s talking about sounds like something that might take a primetime ABC program two seasons to get to. And Grant isn’t the only one playing multiple roles.

Most of the entire, and impressive, cast will be asked to take on different characters and even different genders. Along with Grant, this includes Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Keith David and Jim Sturgess. It was previously revealed in a New York Times profile back in early December that Berry will be playing a Jewish woman in the 1930s and an old tribal woman in her portions of the film. She was quoted saying, “The biggest change for me as an actor is to have two different film units and two different film crews and to go between the two from one day to the next.”

Ben Whishaw even spoke about the multiple roles he’ll be playing saying:

Everyone in the cast is playing at least three parts, some big and some small. I’m doing three: Frobisher in the thirties; a female American in the seventies, in the Luisa Rey section; and a smallish role, where I’m basically an extra, in a modern-day nursing home, in the Timothy Cavendish section. Everybody’s swapping race and gender, so it’s very ambitious and quite fun. I’ll really love playing a woman!

As I already mentioned, the film even has multiple directors in Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), which Grant briefly touched on while noting his curiosity in seeing how it all turns out. “I have seen little bits of cut footage and it is just astonishing,” he said. “I probably had 20 shooting days, and each of [the directors] is shooting their own part of the film with their own crews. It’s remarkable.”

Remarkable may be too small a word to describe it should it all be pulled off. As of now Warner Bros. has not yet set a release date, though expectation has been that we will see it this fall. Have any of you read the source material, does this sound as if it may be too good to be true or are the Wachowskis ambitious and unique enough to pull it off?

You can check out photos of Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Keith David on the set of Cloud Atlas right here.

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