[Due to my on-going Internet problems at home, I wasn’t able to post this when I wanted; my hope is that because it’s about one of my favorite actors you’ll forgive the tardiness. -TL]
Fans of actor and Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris (or NPH, as he was famously dubbed in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) will have more movie-goodness to rejoice about as The Hollywood Reporter posted the day after his awesome hosting gig at the Tony Awards ceremony in early June that he has booked roles in two films that will be filming during the summer hiatuses from his role as womanizer Barney Stinson in “How I Met Your Mother.”
The smaller part is in Beastly, a modern retelling of the French “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale that’s based on the ALA-favored novel by young adult writer Alex Flinn. Set in modern day New York City, NPH will be playing the blind tutor to the film’s main character Kyle Kingsbury, as played by young Brit actor Alex Pettyfer, who is no stranger to book-to-screen adaptations (Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Stormbreaker). The “beauty” to Pettyfer’s “beast” will be “High School Musical” star Vanessa Hudgens, while the witch who starts all of the action will be played by Mary-Kate Olsen (the one who has anorexia, not the other one). The production studio is CBS Films.
NPH’s other role will be the male lead in an indie comedy called The Best and the Brightest, another film set in New York City on the Upper East Side, where he and his social status-seeking wife Bonnie Somerville have moved from Delaware and are attempting to crack their way into the world of the tonied private schools.
Directed/co-written by Josh Shelov (Hooligans) and produced by Robert and Patricia Weiser, Nicholas Simon and Richard Schiffrin, I gotta tell you that it’s really some of the rest of the cast that has me salivating over Brightest more than Beastly; with names like Amy Sedaris, John Hodgman, Peter Serafinowicz, and Kate Mulgrew how could you go wrong?
Beastly is in pre-production in Montreal while Brightest is currently filming in Philadelphia.