There’s plenty of tragedy to go around with the death of Heath Ledger. One of the smallest is how his death impacts the movies he was working on. We know The Dark Knight is fine, he finished shooting that. But Terry Gilliam’s next project, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is screwed.
Gilliam still had more to shoot with his star, and now he’s scrambling to find a way around this problem. The Sun says his solution may be to replace him with Johnny Depp… in the middle of the film. Their studio source told them, “There is a point in the film when Heath falls through a magic mirror. He could change into another character after that and that is where Johnny would come in.”
It’s hard not to feel a little bad for Terry Gilliam here, this sort of thing seems to always happen to him. Making a movie with Terry Gilliam is like inviting the wrath of god. The last time Gilliam attempted to work with Johnny Depp, it was on an adaptation of Don Quixote which was, quite literally, washed away by a flood. If you need someone to step in for Ledger, I can’t think of anyone better than Depp to do it, and the movie is supposed to be a strange, fantastical time-travel flick so maybe it’ll work. What probably won’t work so well now is a scene Ledger reportedly already shot for the movie in which his character hangs himself. Maybe this is yet another Terry Gilliam project which will never make it to movie theaters.
