Forest Whitaker and Woody Harrelson are the latest thesbians to jump aboard Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace. The two actors will join Christian Bale, Sam Shepard, Zoe Saldana and Casey Affleck to top off the A-list cast.
Whitaker, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor (The Last King of Scotland), will play Sheriff Wesley Barnes of the mill town, Braddock. PA. Harrelson will play the crime boss Harian DeGroat.
This will mark Cooper’s first film since 2009 when he directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar win for Best Actor in Crazy Heart. Besides directing, Cooper wrote the script. The storyline follows Bale’s character, an ex-con who is trying to change his life for the better, but somehow gets himself and his brother, played by Affleck, injected back into the violent criminal underworld.
The producers of the film include Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free Productions, and Relativity CEO Tyan Kavanaugh.
Production is a day old and is shooting in Pennsylvania. The film will be released in the spring of 2013.
