Paul Dano has become the latest actor to join Steve McQueen‘s Shame follow-up Twelve Years a Slave. Another movie about slavery (Django Unchained) already has a stellar cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays the lead character, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt.
Twelve Years a Slave is based on the true accounts of Solomon Northup’s novel by the same name, originally published in 1853.
Twelve Years adapts the true tale of Northup (Ejiofor), one of the most famous figures in Spa City history, a free-born black man, lured from Saratoga Springs, sold into slavery and later rescued; actually, Northup was approached by two men offering a job in a circus playing the violin. But when he turned up at the accommodation in Washington DC they’d promised him, he was drugged and sold into slavery on a cotton plantation in Louisiana. After more than a decade suffering under the yoke of various slave owners, he was able to get a message to his wife, who helped secure his freedom.
Dano will be playing one of his more unsympathetic characters, one of the cruel slave owners who beat the lead character unmercifully. Fassbender and Brad Pitt star in currently unspecified roles.
Dano has big year ahead with the indie film Ruby Sparks that hit theaters on July 25th, 2012, and then in September has a part in Rian Johnson’s Looper with Joseph Gord0n-Levitt.
