Twelve Years A Slave brings on Paul Dano to join Fassbender, Ejiofor, and Pitt

It has been over half a year since we last heard about any developments on the third collaboration between writer/director/visual poet Steve McQueen and actor/actor/all around classy guy Michael Fassbender, but now we have some more casting news in the form of Paul Dano (THERE WILL BE BLOOD). 

TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE is an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiographical novel about “a free black man who, promised a job playing violin in the circus, is drugged and dragged to Louisiana and sold into slavery.” And Dano, in a role deliciously against type, “will play one of the slave owners who brutalizes him.”

Chiwetel Ejiofor (SERENITY) will be playing Northup, while Fassbender and producer Brad Pitt also star in currently unspecified roles.  The last collaboration between Fassbender and McQueen was SHAME, a film which truly affected me in a way I have never before experienced.  It was spectacular and beautiful and tied in my mind for the best film of 2011, so my anticipation for TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE is the very definition of eager.