Beautiful Actress Shortlist and New Details on Joseph Kosinski's 'Horizons'

Friday, 26 August 2011 11:47 Written by Jordan DeSaulnier

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Beautiful Actress Shortlist and New Details on Joseph Kosinski's 'Horizons'

Horizons, director Joseph Kosinski's follow-up to his debut feature TRON: Legacy, has had a not-uneventful ride so far. Before the TRON sequel hit theaters, Disney acquired the project, then titled Oblivion, in a heated bidding war. In the middle of the design stage of pre-production, the studio decided that a big budget PG-13 science fiction actioner did not fit with their current strategy, so Kosinski shopped his would-be movie around and it pretty quickly landed at Universal Pictures. Through pretty much the whole process, Tom Cruise has been on board to star, and now, with the project on the fast-track, Kosinski is testing actresses for the two lead female roles. A shortlist of the actresses under consideration has emerged, and it includes no shortage of talented and beautiful women who might just share the screen with Cruise, along with a few salient details on the story and screenwriter.

The story is set in a postapocalyptic future where humanity lives above the clouds, as marauding aliens have made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. Cruise stars as Jack, a soldier who routinely ventures down to the surface to repair drones keeping the cloud-dwellers safe. Apparently, everything changes during a mission when a gorgeous woman crash lands, setting of on a revelatory, action-stuffed adventure with Jack.

Variety's report on the actress shortlist makes no mention of a crash-landing women, but says there are two female leads: Victoria, Jack's ladyfriend who monitors him from the clouds whilst he's doing repairs, as well as Julia, Jack's fiancee from before the alien invasion. Are one of these women the same one who kicks off the plot by crashing on earth?

Either way, a bevy of actresses are testing for the two parts this Saturday. They include Noomi Rapace, Olivia Wilde, Olga Kurylenko, Brit Marling, and Jessica Chastain. Apparently there are other actresses up for the roles as well, but these are the ones we know.

Rapace played the title character in the Swedish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, has a supporting role in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and is the star of Ridley Scott's Alien quasi-prequel Prometheus. Wilde worked with Kosinski previously on TRON: Legacy, appeared this summer in both Cowboys & Aliens and The Change-Up, and will next be seen in In Time. Kuylenko is most well known for her turn as a Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace, though she also had roles in the videogame adaptations Max Payne and Hitman, and also played a badass Pict scout in Centurion. Marling is probably the biggest surprise on the list; she just broke out as the co-writer and star of the indepedent sci-fi-twinged drama Another Earth. Finally, Chastain starred this summer in Tree of Life and The Help, and she has a bunch of upcoming films, including The Debt, Coriolanus, The Wettest Country in the World, and an untitled film with her legendary Tree of Life director Terrence Malick.

The film is based on the Radical Publishing comic book Oblivion by Joseph Kosinski himself and Andree Wallin. We already knew that Karl Gadjusek and Oscar-winning The Departed writer William Monaghan had contributed to the screenplay, but according to Variety, Michael Arndt recently polished the script, as well. Arndt won an Oscar of his own for Litte Miss Sunshine, and he also wrote the Toy Story 3 script.