Movie Casting News: Matthew Macfadyen joins Keira Knightley in Disney's The Nutcracker and the Four Realms!

I've always wanted Keira Knightley & Matthew Macfadyen to work together again in another movie whether they pair up as a couple or just co-stars. Well, good news! It may not be the former, but looks like the latter is happening, Keira & Matthew are reuniting and co-starring together in a new Walt Disney Pictures feature film titled The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, a live-action adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffman’s Christmas Eve tale about a young girl who finds a Nutcracker doll among the family’s gifts and is charged by her parents to take special care of it. This will be their third film together since Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina! The only one missing is director Joe Wright, but unfortunately, he's not directing this one, Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Hundred-Foot's Journey) is. Still, I'm glad KK & MM are going to be in the same movie. So, yeah, I'm even more excited and looking forward for this movie now, which is currently in pre-production with a stellar cast and is slated for 2018 release! I previously posted here last August that Keira Knightley to play Sugar Plum Fairy in Disney's The Nutcracker and more casting (scroll down below) has been announced since then.

More info. on MM's casting in The Nutcracker film and also his casting on the HBO pilot titled Succession, and Keira's casting in The Aftermath film below...
While Keira's will play Sugar Plum Fairy, Matthew will be playing Mr. Stahlbaum, in the Walt Disney film The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, according to MM's agency, Hamilton Hodell. Helen Mirren (who just co-starred with Keira in the upcoming film, Collateral Beauty), Morgan Freeman, Ellie Bamber (aka Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Mackenzie Foy, Misty Copeland, and Miranda Hart also star in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.

THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS SYNOPSIS

The classic story told of a young girl named Clara who receives a nutcracker doll from her godfather on Christmas Eve. When she goes to check on it later that night, the clock strikes midnight, and she finds herself thrust into a fantastical world where she is in the middle of a war between gingerbread soldiers and an army of mice.

In other MM TV news, Ripper Street's final Season 5 premieres on Amazon Prime UK's streaming site today with 6 episodes! 

Also, Matthew has been cast in a new pilot for HBO. More info. below via Deadline.

Succession (Pilot) - HBO

HBO has ordered drama pilot for Succession.

Written by Jesse Armstrong, Succession follows the saga of the Roys, a fictional American global-media family that is not only rich and powerful but also powerfully dysfunctional. The drama will explore family loyalty, international business, and the perils of power in the 21st century. The plot has been drawing parallels to the ongoing real-life saga of the Redstone media clan.

Matthew Macfadyen will play Tom, Shiv’s ambitious partner/fiancé and a senior executive at the firm.  Shiv (Siobhan) Roy (actress Sarah Snook), Logan (Brian Cox)’s only daughter and younger sister to Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin). Like Roman, she sits on the board of directors but does not work at the firm and has been pursuing a career in politics.

Read more info. on Deadline. The pilot will film in New York.

And lastly, Deadline also reported that Fox Searchlight Lands ‘The Aftermath’ With Keira Knightley & Alexander Skarsgard.

EXCLUSIVE: In feverish bidding, Fox Searchlight has acquired The Aftermath, a Scott Free-produced adaptation of the Rhidian Brook novel that has Keira Knightley and Alexander Skarsgard in talks to star, with James Kent directing. He helmed Testament Of Youth. Ridley Scott is producing.

Numerous companies vied for the package, but Searchlight closed the deal. Race scribes Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel adapted the screenplay.

The book, an international bestseller, is set in postwar Germany in 1946. Rachael Morgan arrives in the ruins of Hamburg in the bitter winter, to be reunited with her husband Lewis, a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city. But as they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an extraordinary decision: They will be sharing the grand house with its previous owners, a German widower and his troubled daughter. In this charged atmosphere, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal.