Philip Seymour Hoffman is riding high off of the publicity of his central role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and as the saying goes, strike while the iron is hot. Thus, we are now getting word out of Deadline that Hoffman has signed on to star in A Most Wanted Man, the new film by director Anton Corbijn (Control, The American).
A modern day political thriller, A Most Wanted Man concerns “a mysterious half-Chechen, half-Russian man, brutally scarred from torture, [who] surfaces in the city’s Islamic community” while looking for help in salvaging his deceased father’s fortune. Of course, nothing about this man is as it seems, and his true motives and his mysterious origins are anyone’s guess.
Along the way, he is joined by “a conflicted British private banker and a young female lawyer fiercely determined to protect the rights of persecuted émigrés.” Hoffman will be playing a “brilliant, roguish chief of a covert German spy unit… who fights to put together the pieces as the clock ticks.”
Given the power and magnetism of some of Hoffman’s recent performances, I see this as being a pretty good fit for the actor. With Corbijn – who has made two well-respected films – and the rest of the cast including Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams, and Robin Wright, I see this as being something to keep an eye on.
Don’t you agree?