Update: Deadline has now confirmed Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell’s casting in Andrew Haigh’s Belly of the Beast. The film will launch sales at the Cannes Film Market later this month.
Ben Stiller and Colin Farrell have joined All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh’s new movie.
According to Jeff Sneider’s The InSneider, Stiller and Farrell have both been cast in Haigh’s new movie, Belly of the Beast.
Published in 1981, In the Belly of the Beast is a non-fiction novel written by Jack Henry Abbott. The book collects letters that Abbott wrote to journalist Norman Mailer while he was in prison for approximately a decade. Once he received parole, Abbott struggled with readapting to life outside prison and went on to commit an erroneous crime just weeks after being released.
According to Sneider, Stiller will play Mailer in Haigh’s movie, while Farrell will play Abbott. Haigh and Alexis Jolly wrote the script, which is based on a 2017 novel — Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” — written by Jerome Loving that details Mailer and Abbot’s relationship.
Colin and Claudine Farrell, Alison Rosenzweig, and Michael Gaeta serve as producers while Jillian Apfelbaum, Tristen Tuckfield, and Nic Gordon as executive producers.
What is Haigh’s newest movie, All of Us Strangers?
Haigh previously directed 2009’s Greek Pete, 2011’s Weekend, 2015’s 45 Years, and 2017’s Lean on Pete. His latest film, All of Us Strangers, is currently playing in select theaters in the United States. Based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, it stars Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy.
“One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life,” the synopsis reads. “As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.”
