Here’s some cool casting news: Deadline reports that Franco Nero, star of the original Django back in 1966, has signed on to join the cast of The Pope’s Exorcist, a supernatural thriller starring Russell Crowe – and Nero will be playing the Pope!
Nero’s fellow new additions to the cast are Laurel Marsden (Ms. Marvel), Cornell S. John (Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), and newcomer Peter DeSouza-Feighoney. They join the previously announced Alex Essoe (Starry Eyes) and Daniel Zovatto (It Follows). And, of course, Crowe.
A few years ago, The Exorcist director William Friedkin made a documentary about Father Gabriele Amorth (and you can read our review of The Devil and Father Amorth at THIS LINK), a real-life exorcist who passed away in 2016 at the age of 91. Crowe is playing Father Amorth in The Pope’s Exorcist.
The Pope’s Exorcist is set up at Screen Gems. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the company acquired the rights to tell the story of the exorcist’s life from Michael Patrick Kaczmarek and faith-based media company Loyola Productions. That deal included rights to Amorth’s two international bestselling memoirs An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories, as well as other “detailed accounts of his exploits of pulling the devil out of people all over the world.”
Crowe will portray real-life figure Father Gabriele Amorth, a priest who acted as chief exorcist of the Vatican and who performed more than 100,000 exorcisms in his lifetime. Amorth wrote two memoirs and detailed his experiences battling Satan and demons that had clutched people in their evil.
Overlord‘s Julius Avery is directing The Pope’s Exorcist from a screenplay by Evan Spiliotopoulos, with revisions by Chuck MacLean. The script was based on original drafts by Chester Hastings & R. Dean McCreary, which received revisions from Michael Petroni.
Scott Strauss, Michael Bitar, and Giselle Johnson are overseeing this project for Screen Gems. The film is being produced by Michael Patrick Kaczmarek through his company Jesus & Mary, Loyola president Eddie Siebert, Doug Belgrad of 2.0 Entertainment, and Jeff Katz of Worldwide Katz.
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