After a long, hard casting search Quentin Tarantino has gotten his wish and Kerry Washington has officially landed the role of Broomhilda in his newest film Django Unchained. The casting process took so long because Tarantino was trying to land an unknown actress in the part, but finally decided to go with the established name.
Kerry Washington teams up with Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, M.C. Gainey, Dennis Christopher, Gerald McRaney, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, Tom Savini, and perhaps Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Washington, who you recognize from the film Ray or The Last King of Scotland or the live-action Fantastic Four films of 2005 and 2007, will certainly bring some weight to the part.
She will next appear in the comedy The Details, and she stars with Eddie Murphy in another comedy A Thousand Words, which premieres on March 23rd, 2012.
Django Unchained gives homage to both the Sergio Corbucci original Django, and Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki (dish, spaghetti) Western Django, which features Tarantino with may be some cheesy talk, but the graphical input of martial arts choreography makes the movie really volatile.
Also long-rumored inspiration was Elmore Leonard’s novel Forty Lashes Less One.
According to one source who has read the script:
Django is a freed slave, who, under the tutelage of a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) becomes a bad-ass bounty hunter himself, and after assisting Waltz in taking down some bad guys for profit, is helped by Waltz in tracking down his slave wife and liberating her from an evil plantation owner. And that doesn’t even half begin to cover it! This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.
Wow! The flick will begin shooting early in 2012 for a December 25th, 2012 release. Stay tuned.
Django Unchained poster by Federico Mancosu
