Natalie Dormer Joins Mel Gibson and Sean Penn in THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN

Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games star Natalie Dormer has scored one of the female leads in The Professor and The Madman, a movie about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary that's being headlined by Mel Gibson and Sean Penn. THR has the breakdown of the story:

Gibson will play Professor James Murray, who in 1857 set about compiling the OED, one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. Penn will play Dr. W.C. Minor, who submitted more than 10,000 entries but also was an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
Dormer will play a widow whose husband was killed by Penn and whose family he wants to help. A complicated romance ensues.

Complicated, indeed. Sounds bizarre, but that seems to fit pretty well with this whole movie, which seems like a really strange project to begin with.

Farhad Safinia, who wrote Apocalypto for Mel Gibson back in 2006, is directing this project, which Gibson has been trying to launch since 1998.

I'm really hoping this ends up being a juicy role for Dormer, and I can't wait to see her dig into some big parts as Game of Thrones comes to an end. Even if she turns out to be not much more than a token wife character here, this movie should get a lot of attention because of its...let's call them "volatile" leading men, and either way, she's trying to make her own luck by co-writing and starring in a revenge thriller called In Darkness that sounds pretty great.

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