“The Actor” is ready to wake up.
The new movie, from “Anomalisa” director Duke Johnson, stars André Holland and Gemma Chan, and you can watch the brand-new trailer right now.
The official synopsis notes that the story follows “Paul Cole (Holland) stranded in a mysterious small town with no memory of who he is or how he got here. Without a sense of identity or purpose, he starts from scratch and begins courting a local costume designer Edna (Chan). As bits and pieces of his past slowly emerge, he attempts to find his way home, but time is slippery, appearances can’t be trusted and it’s unclear which of his identities is real.”
May Calamawy, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, Olwen Fouéré, Edward Hogg, Toby Jones, Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman and Scott Alexander Young also star.
What’s fascinating about “The Actor” is that it is based on a Donald E. Westlake novel that the legendary mystery writer never published in his lifetime. It was written in 1963 and couldn’t find a publisher, and was later shopped around in the late 1970s, by which point Westlake had deemed it too dated. After the writer died in 2008, a manuscript was discovered and published in 2010 by Hard Case Crime. And now that once lost story has become a major motion picture.
Johnson, of course, directed the stop-motion “Anomalisa” with Charlie Kaufman (who executive produced “The Actor”) and is making his live-action feature debut here. You definitely get a sense of the playfulness of animation in the trailer.
Neon will release “The Actor” exclusively in theaters on March 14.
