Laura Linney has already taken a turn playing the wife of a President as Abigail Adams in the John Adams miniseries; now she's going to play a mistress. According to Deadline she's signed on to play Daisy, the distant cousin and probable mistress of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in Hyde Park on the Hudson, a drama about what happens when that affair is revealed during a visit from the King and Queen of England. As we wrote about when the project when we first learned about it, the king and queen who pay the visit are King George VI and his wife, making it a kind of sequel to The King's Speech if you want to think of it that way.

I still haven't quite gotten over the news that Bill Murray is on board as FDR, making it both the strangest and most potentially brilliant casting choice I've heard of in a long, long time. As for Linney and Murray as a pair, why not? Unexpected matches like that can totally elevate a movie when they work well. They're still casting for who will play Eleanor Roosevelt, the jilted wife, but given the quality of actors director Roger Michell already has on board, the sky pretty much seems to be the limit on who they could get. Focus Features will be selling the project at Cannes next week, so count on seeing maybe one more name join the cast before that happens.