Now this is what you call stunt casting. Joseph Fiennes will play Michael Jackson in a TV comedy about a bizarre road trip on 9/11. According to the Guardian, the Sky Arts project will tell the story of how Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando piled into a car on September 11th, 2001, and fled New York for safety. The thought of those three in a car together is hilarious enough (for starters, who drove and who called ‘shotgun’?). Add to that, though, the casting of Fiennes. Last time I checked, Fiennes is white, and Jackson was … oh, hang on.
The movie has the unimaginative title Elizabeth, Michael and Marlon (I don’t know why they don’t go for something snappier like The Diamond Lady, Moonwalker and the Fat Man). Of course, it probably never happened. A former assistant of Taylor’s told Vanity Fair that “Elizabeth stayed behind, where she went to a church to pray, and she went to an armory where people were who couldn’t get home or who’d stayed behind to look for the missing. She also went down to Ground Zero, where she met with first responders. Eventually, the airports opened and she flew home.” The parts of Taylor and Brando have yet to be cast. Can someone check if Oprah Winfrey and Michael Cera are busy?
