Playing to type as the seemingly psychotic studio boss in this week’s Hollywoodland, Brit hero Hoskins will be cropping up on the telly in this Christmas’ all-star feature-length BBC One adaptation of The Wind in the Willows as Badger, alongside Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas as Toad, The League of Gentlemen‘s Mark Gatiss as Rat, Lee Ingleby as Mole and Imelda Staunton. He’ll also be returning to TV and period Hollywood for the 1920s-set mini-series The Englishman’s Boy, based on the book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he’ll play a movie producer desperate to hunt down a former Western star. Fingers crossed for a UK screening at some point…
In terms of the movies, Hoskins will take on a more challenging role than usual inthe low-budget Ruby Blue, as an elderly man whose friendship with an eight-year-old girl arouses all kinds of unsavoury local suspicioons when she goes missing. He will then appear alongside Sean Bean in British movie Outlaw, following a modern-day vigilante group out to right the wrongs of an unjust society, with another Brit flick, Sparkle, also due out next year, with Hoskins starring alongside The West Wing‘s Stockard Channing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Anthony Head in a tale of a young Scouser who heads to London to become a rich woman’s toyboy. Perhaps most interesting, however, is Citizen Brando, about a young Tunisian boy’s search for the American Dream through the films of Marlon Brando, which Hoskins is co-producing.
Pocket Films Blog 