Filmonic
May 29, 2011

During the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month it was announced that Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent would be joining Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in Cloud Atlas, which will be co-directed by The Wachowskis (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). At the time it was mentioned each actor would be playing multiple roles, and Weaving recently confirmed he will in fact be playing 6 different characters in the film.

From Herald Sun:

In August, he will take his acclaimed production of Uncle Vanya, with Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh and Jacki Weaver, to Washington DC. After that, he will head to Berlin to reunite with the Wachowski Brothers, directors of the Matrix films, for their big screen version of the acclaimed novel Cloud Atlas, co-starring Academy Award winners Tom Hanks and Halle Berry.

“That’s a project that’s really exciting because all the actors will be playing more than one role,” Weaving says. “I actually have six characters in the same film and they are all different people in six different stories.”

Cloud Atlas, based on the novel by David Mitchell, follows six storylines which range from the South Pacific in the 19th Century to California in the 1970s to a post-apocalyptic future. With Weaving taking on that many characters we can probably expect the rest of the cast to play a similar number of roles, depending on whether they fit within the different time periods.

It’ll be interesting to see how The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer handle this as it’s already been compared to Christoper Nolan’s Inception in the sense that it’s supposed to be an intelligent movie that will require the audience to think. Having the same actors popping up in different time periods could certainly confuse a few people.

Filming is set to begin in September, with Warner Bros. releasing the film sometime in 2012.