Cranston enters talks to join hostage crisis movie; Affleck also casts himself.
The casting for Ben Affleck’s political thriller ‘Argo’ continues with Bryan Cranston (‘Total Recall,’ ‘Breaking Bad’) becoming the latest actor to enter negotiations to join the cast.
Penned by Chris Terrio and based on Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 Wired magazine article ‘How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue American from Tehran,’ the story tells how the CIA and the Canadian government teamed to rescue six U.S. diplomats who’d been taken hostage in 1979. The agency’s ruse posited that the captives were actually a Hollywood film crew scouting locations for a movie titled ‘Argo.’
The movie will star Alan Arkin as former O.S.S. spy, now a movie producer Lester Siegel and John Goodman as Oscar-winning ‘Planet of the Apes’ makeup artist John Chambers. It was recently announced that Affleck has decided to cast himself in lead role of Tony Mendez, the CIA exfiltration expert who masterminded the plan.
According to Variety, Cranston is set to play Jack O’Donnell, an Irish CIA agent from Boston and former bodyguard of President Eisenhower.