Oh, Twitter, how useful you are for letting actors (and other filmmaking folk) announce details of future projects through your unofficial channels. The latest celebrity Twitterator to give his career the 140-character press treatment is John Cusack, who has announced that he’s playing Edgar Allen Poe in **The Raven{
V for Vendetta/Ninja Assassin’s James McTeigue is busy gearing up the film, which is set during the last five days of the writer’s life. But this isn’t some stuffy biopic with Poe gracefully dying and experiencing characters from his stories coming to life to bid him a tearful farewell. Nope, the tale will see him teaming up with a detective to hunt down a serial killer with a serious Poe obsession who has kidnapped the scribbler’s fiancée and is out on a murder spree inspired by his work. Well, it’s only a slightly worse idea than some fan fiction we’ve read in our time…
McTeigue has been through a few Poes as the film has developed, with Joaquin Phoenix and Ewan McGregor both attached at different times. And he’ll need to find a new detective, since his most recent choice, Jeremy Renner, is headed off to join the new Mission: Impossible film (which is apparently no longer using the “4” in its title).
The film will start shooting at the end of October in Budapest and Serbia. Cusack, meanwhile, should really look into a sub-editor for his tweets…