Jason’s Juvenile Delinquent: Dane DeHaan, who plays the cute and sexually aggressive (yet lost) Jesse on HBO’s In Treatment, recently told us he’ll be on the next season of True Blood! Nikki Finke has a few more details today: “He’ll play Timbo, one of the teens Jason (Ryan Kwanten) takes care of in Hotshot.†Everybody’s a little bit queer and a little sexually aggressive on True Blood, so this role should not be a huge stretch. Meanwhile, actress Rebecca Wisocky will appear in True Blood’s Season 4 premiere as “Queen Mab, an elegant beauty with a temper who presides over a fantasy land.†Huh. Are things about to get even stranger on this show? [Deadline]
Best Westerns: Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana are in the midst of writing two period Westerns:The Color of Lightning for Ridley Scott, and an adaptation of the S. C. Gwynne book Empire of the Summer Moon, to be directed by Crazy Heart’s Scott Cooper. The former’s about a freed slave who moves his wife and three children to Texas and plots revenge when his oldest son is killed, loosely based on a true story said to have inspired the classic Western The Searchers. The latter film will be “a Braveheart-style epic†about Comanche warrior Quanah, who held the westward expansion of settlers at bay for 40 years. [Deadline]
Caged In: Nicolas Cage will star in Simon West’s action thrillerMedallion, a part originally thought to be intended for Clive Owen or Jason Statham. The story follows a former master thief who has only a few hours to find his daughter after she’s kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a New York medallion taxi cab. It’s written by David Guggenheim, a former Us Weekly journalist (!) who segued into screenwriting when he sold his high-profile spec Safe House (soon to be a Denzel Washington thriller from Universal). It can happen. [HR]
Looking for Love: A&E is launching Big Mike, a new pilot from Adam Sandler’s production company, Happy Madison, with Something About Mary co-writers Ed Decter and John Strauss penning. The show will center around a plus-size detective and “force of nature†in the San Diego PD, yet to be cast, who has everything going for him sans a romantic life. We hope that’s not just because he’s fat! [Deadline]
Housewives Hero: Andy Cohen, the mastermind behind the Real Housewives franchise and host of the always entertaining Watch What Happens — “a rare combination of a programming executive who is also a TV/Internet personality,†as Nikki Finke puts it — has been promoted to executive vice-president of original programming and development at Bravo, as Intel noted earlier. He will continue to oversee the network’s original content and also confuse people with his mix of adorable smirks and possible latent evil and/or genius. [Deadline]
Better Than Frasier: BBC America has acquired the basic cable rights to all four seasons of Showtime’s The Tudors, to run in syndication on Tuesdays and during all-day marathons. It will likely edit out a lot of fun parts. [Deadline]