Creepy Casting: More Thor News!

Posted by sean in Latest News, Movies on November 20th, 2009

Fans of The Wire will be pretty excited to hear the news about the latest addition to the cast of Thor: Idris Elba will be traveling to Asgard.

Elba is best known for playing Stringer Bell, the business-minded right-hand man of drug kingpin Avon Barksdale on the HBO series The Wire. More recently, he appeared in Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla, and played Charles Miner, a rival to Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott, in an entertaining turn on The Office.

In Thor, he’ll be playing Heimdall, sentry of Asgard and brother to Thor’s lover, Sif. True, Elba doesn’t exactly look Norse, but then, Michael Clarke Duncan doesn’t look like the comic book image of Wilson Fisk, and his portrayal of the Kingpin was just about the only good thing about the Daredevil movie. And Stringer Bell was one of the most compelling characters on The Wire, thanks to a great performance from the British actor, so hopefully he’ll bring the same energy to the screen here.

Elba joins an already impressive cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman, Chris Hemsworth, and others, in a film to be directed by Kenneth Branagh. The filmmaker springs most readily to mind as the man who brought us the atrocious Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994 (yeah, that’s the one where DeNiro played the monster). However, he’s also directed a number of Shakespeare adaptations, including Henry V, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Hopefully, this indicates an eye for all things epic that’ll lend itself perfectly to a tale of Norse gods come to Earth.

The way the cast is shaping up, I have faith in this movie. As one of Marvel Comics’ most badass characters, Thor certainly deserves a big, awesome flick – and I think we’ll be getting exactly that.