Nicole Kidman made a slightly unconventional move for an Oscar winner earlier this year, popping up opposite Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston in Just Go With It, a comedy that pretty much every critic who saw it loathed. But don't worry, Kidman isn't jumping on the Happy Madison gravy train and abandoning interesting movies just yet. According to THR, she's considering replacing Sofia Vergara in The Paperboy, a crime thriller that will be Lee Daniels's long-awaited follow-up film to the Oscar-nominated Precious.

Vergara is actually only dropping out because Tobey Maguire did; production was set to start this summer, but when Maguire bailed they had to push the shoot back, making it conflict with Vergara's commitments to Modern Family. When we first wrote about the casting back in May, I speculated that Maguire would be playing the main character, a Miami newspaper reporter who returns to his hometown to write about a murder and the perpetrator who possibly was wrongfully imprisoned. Zac Efron, who is still part of the cast, I figured would be playing the titular character, the main character's brother, with Matthew McConaughey-- also still on board-- as the reporter's partner.

The character Vergara was set for and that Kidman might step into is a "woman with a dark side," writing letters to men on death row, one of whom I assume is the accused murderer. Kidman is a pretty huge transition from Vergara, but given that the entire film seems kind of mysterious right now, it's hard to know if it's a good or bad swap. Now they just need to fin someone to replace Maguire, who from the looks of it was going to play the most important character. Bringing in an actress of Kidman's caliber might be a method of bringing someone else equally high-profile for the part. We'll find out soon enough, I guess, if Daniels and company still plan to make their late-summer start date.