James Franco cast as Fidel Castro for some damn reason

Today, in "Look, we don't make the news, we just report on it" news: James Franco is playing Fidel Castro, we guess.

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This comes to us per Deadline , which reports that Franco—who hasn't released a project since 2019, the year he was accused by multiple students of his Studio 4 of sexually exploitative actions and practices—has signed on to star in Miguel Bardem's Alina Of Cuba . The Alina in question is Castro's daughter, Alina Fernández Revuelta, a vocal critic of her father's government who's involved in production of the film

Rather than say anything that might be seen as Deadline about casting Franco (who has since settled the lawsuit against him, and filmed a couple of different as-yet unreleased projects

Finding and convincing James Franco to play Castro, was a fun and challenging process and has been the collaborative work of the universe, because our director's original order was to find an actor who holds a close physical resemblance to the real Castro to build from, along with finding someone Alina Fernandez would strongly endorse. To get there on such a tough look to cast, we used Fidel Castro's ancient Galician heraldry as our focal compass, and then combed through the entire ranks of actors with Latin roots in Hollywood to find someone who has a similar facial structure. In executing a close search into our hopefuls through the eye of Spanish and Portuguese genealogy which the Galicians held, we found that James, by far, had the closest facial likeness of our Industry's leading actors, meaning that the focus would be to build out his character accent and we'd have a stunning on-screen match to intrigue audiences and bring the story to life with true visual integrity. Altogether, working with such a supportive and exciting cast has been a true blessing to our team and project.

So, yeah: Congratulations to the universe, sexual misconduct allegations for this exciting casting coup.