X Men actor Caleb Landry Jones has been added to Byzantium’s cast line up. The vampire movie will be helmed by Neil Jordan, whose awesome credentials include 1994’s Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles and The Borgias, alongside producer Steve Woolley of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Byzantium follows a “mother and daughter vampire duo form a deadly pact”.
Cast as the daughter Eleanor is The Lovely Bones actress Saoirse Ronan with actress Gemma Arterton (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) set to play her mother Clara. Caleb Landry Jones has been brought on board to play “a teenager dying of leukemia which in turn forces him to struggle with his mortality, causing Saoirse Ronan’s character to struggle with her own immortality.”
Byzantium should bring a good twist to the already full market of bloodsucking fare out there. The film is an adaption from the play A Vampire Story by Moira Buffini. Check out the lengthy synopsis below from ReelzChannel. The film should arrive in theaters sometime in 2012.
“Two young women arrive in a nameless British small town. Their names are not their own. They don’t declare their ages. Their relationship with each other is not clear. Are they sisters, as their assumed identities declare? Or are they mother and daughter? The eldest, Claire, takes a job in a pub. The youngest, Eleanor, goes to school.
During a truth exercise in her drama class, Eleanor confesses that she has been alive for over two hundred years and has survived by drinking human blood. Her classmates think she is utterly crazy and Mint, her teacher, puts her in touch with the school counselor. She makes one friend, Frank, a boy who has been home educated and is as much of an oddity as Eleanor. He tries to get to the bottom of her vampire delusion, thinking it an epic and compelling psychosis. Why would anyone want to be undead?
Frank’s parents believe that Ella is an anorexic – why does she never eat? Eleanor has started to write her life story as a play. She describes Claire’s background as a prostitute in 19th century London and her own as a child in a private orphanage. Meanwhile, things are falling apart. People are disappearing. Are Eleanor and Claire vampires? Or are they troubled young women on the run?”
