An extremely talented Benedict Cumberbatch, the Emmy-winning star of BBC America's ‘Sherlock,' is in talks to join previously announced Academy Award winners Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in The Weinstein Company's highly anticipated film adaptation of August: Osage County.
John Wells is directing the high-profile project which counts George Clooney among its producers.
The big-screen adaptation of the Pulitzer and Tony winning play by Tracy Letts will star Streep as a dysfunctional mother Violet Weston whose fractured family returns home in a time of crisis. Cumberbatch will play her nephew ‘Little' Charles Aiken, the sensitive son of Streep's sister, Mattie Fay Aiken (Margo Martindale), a sensitive and clumsy character who was referred to in the play as an unemployed screw-up.
The movie is eyeing a late-September start in Oklahoma.
Cumberbatch was recently cast as the villain in a sequel to 2009s Star Trek film and finished Twelve Years a Slave alongside Brad Pitt. He will also play the voice of the dragon Smaug in Peter Jackson's upcoming Hobbit film.
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