Gore Verbinski’s anticipated horror film A Cure for Wellness, which stars Dane DeHaan and Mia Goth, has cast its villain in recent Critics’ Choice Award nominee Jason Isaacs (for Stockholm, Pennsylvania).
Isaacs, best known for his role as the snide Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, will play the aristocratic director of a remote European wellness spa who has sinister intentions toward one of the facility’s patients (Goth). When a young man (DeHaan) is sent to retrieve his missing boss from the spa, he’s drawn into the director’s dastardly plot and finds himself trapped within the spa.
The actor has plenty of experience playing malevolent baddies. His turn as a homicidal religious leader in revisionist Western Sweetwater was a particular standout, but he’s been excelling in villainous roles for years. Most recently, though, Isaacs played the heroic FBI agent at the center of USA’s conspiracy thriller series DIG and a supporting character in last year’s WWII action-drama Fury. So, he’s certainly got the dramatic chops to face off against DeHaan and Goth.
Verbinski has been mired in expensive Disney projects, from hit Pirates of the Caribbean to bomb The Lone Ranger, for long enough that some people have forgotten that the helmer actually had his breakout film in hard-edged horror remake The Ring. It will certainly be refreshing to watch him return to those roots in what sounds like a highly creepy psychological thriller – there’s definitely a sense that a lot is being kept under wraps in terms of the plot here, but Verbinski and New Regency will be sure to play things close to the vest on this one.
Production on A Cure for Wellness is kicking off later this month over in Europe, with plans to get the movie into theaters sometime late this or early next year through 20th Century Fox.
