The star of The Conjuring films looks set to join Amy Adams and Javier Bardem as the leading trio in the new Cape Fear.
When we heard last week that Amy Adams is to move into TV to join Javier Bardem for the upcoming small screen take on Cape Fear, the key question was over who would take on the final role in the leading trio of characters. Adams has joined Javier Bardem in a new take on the story of Max Cady, an ex-prisoner who seeks revenge on the lawyer who put him in prison. In the latest version, the story’s changed a little to make both Sam Bowden and his wife Anna into the legal eagle targets in Cady’s sights.
With Bardem set to play the deranged Cady and Adams playing Anna Bowden, the next question mark lay over who would play her onscreen husband. It’s a role formely inhabited by the likes of Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte in previous adaptations of John D MacDonald’s 1962 novel, The Executioners.
According to The Insneider, Patrick WIlson has now entered negotiations for the role.
A Friend Of The Family’s Nick Antosca has written the ten episode series and will also serve as showrunner for Apple TV+. One of the real draws here is that both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are executive producing, the first time they’ve ever collaborated on a TV series (but not the first time they’ve worked together on a Cape Fear project). The show is said to draw inspiration from MacDonald’s novel and Scorsese’s 1991 film, a lurid and sweatily stylish thriller.
We can already see how Wilson could fit well into such a production, with the actor having been cast before and crafting fine perfomances in similar roles where he’s asked to play the part of the straight man who struggles to adapt to a world spilling out of control. It’s a performance we’ve seen him repeatedly hone in The Conjuring films (pictured), not to mention in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen where he played the film’s staid Bruce Wayne analogue, Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl.
These are all pulpy films to varying degrees, and his straight man style often offsets the strangeness of such worlds well, not least in Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, the 2022 film that saw him play a similar role as a straight-laced former astronaut charged with figuring out why the moon is out of orbit. We still don’t quite know the answer.
Perhaps one (or more) more key pieces of casting are yet to be filled for Cape Fear, those being the younger members of the Bowden family. In McDonald’s original book, the family have three children, while in both film versions, the family was reshaped to have a single daughter. A young Juliette Lewis memorably played Danielle Bowden in Scorsese’s 1991 film, so there’s likely to be at least one more key role to be filled in the production – perhaps more if the show is faithful to the 1962 novel.
We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
