Elias Koteas To Play Villain In Winnie Mandela Biopic

The man who was Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elias Koteas, is heading for South Africa. Joining Terrence Howard and Jennifer Hudson, Koteas has been cast in Winnie, a biopic about Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela's wife. According to THR, Koteas will play a man named De Vries, which they describe as "an overzealous officer in the apartheid police state who rises in power and becomes intent on stopping Winnie and the black anti-apartheid activists from gaining power."

There are plenty of fine character actors in Hollywood, but few are as criminally under-utilized as Elias Koteas. After viewing the first trailer for Shutter Island and seeing him sitting in that large recliner with a dead eye and that awful scar, I was pumped to see some real Koteas action. Then I found out that his character gets less than five minutes of screen time. When this movie comes out it will likely draw some unfair comparisons to Invictus (for better or for worse), but hopefully Koteas, as a character who will likely be the main villain, will be able to remove it from the shadow of Eastwood's film.