High and Mighty: Natalie Portman has joined the cast of the David Gordon Green comedy Your Highness. Danny McBride plays a lazy prince who, along with his brother (James Franco), must set out on a quest to save his kingdom; Portman will play the warrior princess McBride falls in love with. Let’s face it, she’s playing for second place here. [Variety]
Berry Good: Halle Berry is in talks to join Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood-comeback flick The Surrogate (not to be confused with Surrogates), about a couple that finds out the woman carrying their child is insane. Berry would play the wife, not the insane person. That Halle Berry, she’s finer than an ohhh, Halle Berry, Halle Berry. [HR]
Punch Up: British actress Lucy Punch will replace Nicole Kidman in the upcoming, as-yet-untitled Woody Allen movie; she’ll play an Ashley Dupré–type call girl. Kidman apparently had to skedaddle after an overlap with the shooting schedule of John Cameron Mitchell’s The Rabbit Hole (which she’s producing and starring in), but seeing as Punch is ten years younger than Kidman and therefore a bit closer in age to Dupré, maybe Allen just recently got around to actually reading up on that whole Spitzer thing. [HR]
Six Strong: Flipped, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Wendelin Van Draanen’s young-adult novel about a pair of little-kid neighbors growing up together from 1957 to 1963, has landed a whole bunch of people for its cast. Aidan Quinn and Penelope Ann Miller will play the girl’s parents, Kevin Weisman her mentally challenged uncle; Anthony Edwards and Rebecca De Mornay play the boy’s parents, John Mahoney his grandfather. As you can tell, this is a big movie for actors we’re all vaguely familiar with but don’t necessarily care too much about. [HR]
Run, Run, Run: Michael Shannon may join The Runaways, the biopic of the Joan Jett band, in an unspecified lead male role. Just as a reminder, Kristen Stewart is Jett and Dakota Fanning is Cherie Curry. Rock and roll! [HR]
The Inevitable: Octomom has landed a potential reality-TV show. 3Ball Prods. is planning on filming Nadya Suleman and her kids on birthdays and other special occasions, but the series has not yet been sold to a network. According to her attorney Jeff Czech, Suleman “liked it because she’ll get to use a camera and do some of the filming herself.†Because, clearly, she does not have enough to do already. [HR]