After I just got done talking about Jessica Chastain (The Help, The Tree of Life) and how she’ll be awarded the Breakthrough Actress award at the Hollywood Awards in October, news comes from Showblitz announcing she has secured a role as one of the female leads in Horizons, the upcoming sci-fi film from TRON: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski and starring Tom Cruise.
We previously learned Chastain was one of five ladies on the studio’s shortlist, which also included Olivia Wilde (TRON: Legacy), Brit Marling (Another Earth), Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace). The Showblitz report indicates that one of the four other actresses may still land the film’s second leading female role. Kurylenko, however, is not mentioned.
The film, which was once titled Oblivion and is based on the Radical Publishing graphic novel that Kosinski wrote and was then adapted by William Monahan (The Departed) with a rewrite by Karl Gajdusek (Trespass), is set on a future Earth, where civilization lives above the clouds and scavengers collect ancient artifacts from the polluted surface below. When a soldier (Cruise) stationed on the planet below, with a surface destroyed by aliens, finds a mysterious woman in a crash-landed pod, it sets off a chain of events that cause him to question everything he knows.
Chastain will either be playing Cruise’s wife in the film or the previously mentioned mysterious woman. Universal is expected to release the film on July 19, 2013.
