Viggo Mortensen is to team up again with David Cronenberg, with whom he worked on the Oscar-nominated A History of Violence. Mortensen will play a mysterious man with ties to the Russian mafia in Eastern Promises, a thriller about the trafficking of sex workers to the UK . The plot involves a young midwife investigating the life of a Russian girl who dies in childbirth on Christmas Eve. Cronenberg is to direct the script by Steve Knight, who penned Dirty Pretty Things, which also hinged around illegal migrants to the UK.
David Morrissey, the British actor who recently romped with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2, is now to star in a rather different project. He will appear in the children's film The Water Horse, the story of a boy who discovers an egg that hatches a magical creature. Morrissey will play one Captain Hamilton of the Royal British Army who takes over the inn managed by the boy's mother. Morrissey will next be seen on the big screen in The Reaping, a horror thriller starring Hilary Swank.
A biopic of US counterculture icon Timothy Leary is in the pipeline. Production company Miramax has bought the rights to the book Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield, which chronicles how the Harvard academic turned into a leading voice of 1960s rebellion. Screenwriter William Wheeler, who penned the forthcoming 1970s drama The Hoax, will adapt the book.
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown dominates the worldwide box-office for a fourth consecutive week. The animated feature raked in an ice-cool $40m (£22m) in 61 countries this week, lifting its total earnings over the $500m (£280m) bar.
