Nico Tortorella plays what you'd have to call the Skeet Ulrich role in Scream 4, the handsome but not-quite-trustworthy ex-boyfriend of the lead virginal female (Emma Roberts) who seems to be conveniently at hand whenever the murders start going down. The role isn't quite as meaty as the one Ulrich played in the original Scream-- and anyway, where exactly did his career go after that?-- but Tortorella isn't wasting time lining up more work to follow it up. According to THR he's in negotiations to play the villain in Odd Thomas, the Dean Koontz novel adaptation set to shoot this summer in New Mexico.

Anton Yelchin is set to star as the titular character, a short-order cook who happens to be able to talk to the dead. In on his secret are his girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin) and the local chief of police (Willem Dafoe), but Tortorella will start causing trouble as a police officer who works with Dafoe and is secretly on the side of "the Satanic cult bent on destroying the town." He did a nice job conveying a slight sense of menace in Scream 4, and seems like exactly the kind of good-looking dude you shouldn't trust as far as you can throw him. The movie sounds a little, well, odd, and hard to know what to expect, but the casting thus far seems solid and I'm always up for seeing where Yelchin will go in his fairly unpredictable career as a movie star (remember, he's also got Fright Night coming this summer). Plus it's also the new small-scale effort from Stephen Sommers, who last made G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra. Sounds just strange enough that it might work.