You probably haven’t paid much attention to Garrett Hedlund at this point. Most of his career thus far has been designed so you wouldn’t. His breakout role was as the generically handsome avatar lead of the glossy and empty Tron: Legacy, overshadowed at every turn by a CGI-de-aged Jeff Bridges; before then he was the young handsome guy overshadowed by Brad Pitt in Troy, by Gwyneth Paltrow in Country Strong, by Lindsay Lohan in Georgia Rule. Hollywood cycles through one or two of these hunks every year; Hedlund seemed destined to cash that giant Tron paycheck and drift to direct-to-DVD in a few years.
But since Tron, seemingly embarrassed by the whole thing, Hedlund has made exactly two, very good, movies, both of them requiring him to sit behind the wheel of a car and smolder. First as the mercurial Dean Moriarty in the underseen On the Road, then as the near-silent, improbably named road-tripper Johnny Five in Inside Llewyn Davis, Hedlund turned out to be fantastic. By taking a few steps back and sitting still, Hedlund brought out a charisma and screen presence not evident when he was anywhere near a lightcycle. Now big-budget stardom seems to be calling him again—and this time, he’s probably ready for it.
The word at Deadline is that Hedlund has been offered the role of Captain Hook in the big-budget adaptation of Peter Pan, to be directed by Joe Wright. Ignore the fact that we need another Peter Pan about as much as we need a hook for a hand, or that the logline at Deadline says Peter “becomes the savior of the natives” of Neverland. (Do we really never learn?) Wright is a great director, Captain Hook is a great role, and with Hugh Jackman and Javier Bardem also rumored for parts, Hedlund will be forced to up his charisma game; everybody wins.
Pan is just one part of a fleet of classic, public-domain-available adaptations coming our way in the wake of the billion-dollar-earning Alice in Wonderland phantasmagoria and last year’s half-billion-earning Oz: The Great and Powerful. Disney is taking two more swings with this year’s Maleficent and next year’s Cinderella; Godzilla is making a comeback this year, and, of course, there’s an Alice in Wonderland sequel coming. It’s getting noisy and childhood-trampling out there, but Pan at least has a story ripe for reinterpretation (seriously, let’s work on this Native American caricature business), and Wright, whose past two films, Hanna and Anna Karenina, took old stories to swoony, dazzlingly inventive new heights. And now it has Hedlund, who has learned just how not to be worth watching in a tentpole, and now has every reason to get it right the second time.
Pan is due June 26, 2015, the release date formerly handed to Warner Bros.’ massive, now-delayed tentpole Batman vs. Superman—so, y’know , no pressure.
