In what’s quite possibly the strangest casting tidbit of the year so far, The Wrap reports that Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey’s next role will be that of a feline. Going by the name Nine Lives – as if there could be a better title – the film has Barry Sonnenfeld hunkering down in the director’s chair. The Men In Black helmer will work from a script from Daniel Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin, which Sonnenfeld has described as a “funny, emotional, commercial comedy.”
EuropaCorp will finance and produce the film, which possesses a positively wacky premise which ought to suit Spacey’s versatile acting chops. He will play “a workaholic businessman who suffers a terrible accident that leaves him trapped in the body of the family cat.” That’s a bit of a understated descriptor for an accident, isn’t it? Terrible suggests a person might have suffered a fracture or a sprain. Not having their soul transmogrified into the body of a kitty. Regardless, it sounds like a premise ripe with opportunities for Spacey to let his inner animal roam free.
What the report doesn’t illuminate, however, is how the process of rendering the Spacey-cat will occur. CGI would be the easiest – and most likely – guess, or the implementation of a highly-trained feline. Whichever option Sonnenfeld and co. choose, it will mark Spacey’s second time that he’s voiced an animal after his turn as the evil Hopper in the 1998 animated caper, A Bug’s Life.
Currently, Spacey is at work on indie Elvis & Nixon, which finds him in the role of President Richard Nixon opposite Michael Shannon as Elvis. His second in-production project is Dreamworks Animation’s Boss Baby, where his involvement has him in the vocal booth providing the voice for a business-driven infant.
We’ll keep you posted on any further developments for Nine Lives when the news lands. Until then, be sure to let us know what you make of Spacey’s next acting commitment in the comments.
