There’s life after Harry Potter for Draco Malfoy. 20th Century Fox announced that Tom Felton has joined the cast of Caesar: Rise of the Apes as the son of the film’s villain played by Brian Cox, the co-owner of an ape facility.
Caesar will be set in present day San Francisco and focus on the genetic engineering experiments that result in the creation of ape intelligence that starts the war between humans and apes. James Franco leads as a scientist researching Alzheimer’s who ends up being the man responsible for an ape named Caesar, the leader of his kind in the war. The performance capture work for Caesar will be done by Andy Serkis who portrayed the digital character Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Freida Pinto and John Lithgow appear as a primatologist and Franco’s father respectively.
Having gone into this Planet of the Apes prequel with zero enthusiasm, casting was either going to make or break the concept for me. Not that Felton really did that much in the Harry Potter movies or made for a very threatening villain, but adding him to this stellar ensemble certainly made me even more intrigued. Franco, Serkis, Cox and Lithgow are all solid choices, but then we’ve got the relative newcomers, Pinto and Felton. Slumdog Millionaire could not have been a fluke. There’s got to be a reason she’s been cast in film after film ever since Slumdog demolished the 2009 awards season and I can’t wait to find out what it is. On the other hand, Felton has been around for quite a while, but having never seen any of his films beside the Harry Potter series, it should be interesting to see what he has to offer sans wand.
By Perri Nemiroff (via Coming Soon)
