A while back, Blumhouse sent out a casting call in search of the right young actor to fill the role of a 10-year-old female character named Ginger in the Wolf Man reboot they’re making for Universal Pictures with The Invisible Man (2020) director Leigh Whannell. Now it looks like we know who’ll be playing Ginger, as Deadline reports that child actress Matilda Firth has been added to the cast of Wolf Man.
Firth’s previous credits include Hullraisers, Christmas Carole, and Typist Artist Pirate King. Ginger was described as being “Female, 10 years old, white. Blake and Charlotte’s daughter. Smart, precocious, and strong. When her family decides to leave the city for a quieter life in a remote area, she faces her biggest fear, the possibility of losing one or both of her parents forever.”
The leads of the film are Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, both of whom were in the 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene. Abbott is taking on the role of a man whose family is being terrorized by a lethal predator. Garner must be playing his wife, because her character is described as being a mother whose family is being terrorized by a lethal predator. Sam Jaeger is also in the cast.
When Wolf Man was first announced in 2020, Ryan Gosling was set to star in it – and in fact, it got rolling when Gosling pitched this take on the concept of The Wolf Man to Universal, and his idea was then fleshed out into a screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, a writing duo that previously worked on Orange Is the New Black. (Blum also happens to be married to Blumhouse founder Jason Blum.) At the time, it was said the story was “believed to be set in present times and in the vein of Jake Gyllenhaal’s thriller Nightcrawler with an obvious supernatural twist.” The final version of the script is credited to Blum and Angelo, as well as Whannell and his wife Corbett Tuck.
Whannell first signed on to direct the film in 2020, but dropped out the following year. That’s when Gosling’s Blue Valentine and Place Beyond the Pines director Derek Cianfrance came on board. Gosling and Cianfrance both stepped away from Wolf Man early last year… and then Whannell came back.
A collaboration between Blumhouse and Motel Movies, Wolf Man is being produced by Jason Blum. Gosling receives an executive producer credit alongside Ken Kao, Bea Sequeira, Mel Turner, and Whannell.
Wolf Man is scheduled to reach theatres on January 17, 2025. A teaser was recently shown at the CinemaCon event, and was said to open with “Christopher Abbott’s character and his daughter talking, with the daughter asking about death and how ‘everybody dies eventually.‘ We see clips of people running, Julia Garner looking terrified, a bloody arm, and an intense scream from Abbott as he (possibly) becomes the Wolf Man.”
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