After playing a lord on HBO’s critically acclaimed Game of Thrones, Sean Bean appears ready to move up the hierarchal ladder and play a king in Relativity Media’s planned Snow White production, with Tarsem Singh at the helm.
Bean is close to finalizing a deal to play Snow White’s father, whose kingdom is decimated by the fairy tale’s evil queen (Julia Roberts), Variety reports. Lily Collins of The Blind Side has been cast as the apple-eating, dwarf-befriending maiden, while Armie Hammer of The Social Network and Gore Verbinski’s upcoming Lone Ranger feature will play Snow’s hunky love interest.
Maybe this explains why Bean exited Thrones after one season? OK, fine, so Bean’s character, Lord Eddard Stark was supposed to meet the fate he met in the mythical, magical cable series (and I’ll avoid details for those of you who still have Thrones on your DVR, but it’s possible the actor knew he bigger roles on the horizon.
Bean also rarely drifts too far from these mythical realms when seeking stories to tell. Of course, he’s bets known for playing Boromir in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But he also played Zeus in the Percy Jackson film and kicked some tail in Christopher Smith’s little-seen bubonic plague mystery Black Death. These roles fit Bean’s hand like a chain-mailed glove, and he should bring power and prestige to Tarsem’s fantasy once it hits theaters on March 16, 2012.
Adding a genre veteran like Bean to the ensemble still doesn’t help Tarsem’s untitled Snow White top the gonzo casting by rival production Snow White and the Huntsman, however. Not so long as that title still has the likes of Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Eddie Izzard, Bob Hoskins, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones and Nick Frost, as its dwarfs. That’s impossible to beat. At the very least, though, both White films have the potential to be interesting, and the ingredients to actually be great.
