Update: Charles Melton has joined the project, Screen Daily reports.
Since 2016’s Wiener-Dog, Todd Solondz has been attempting to get his next feature Love Child off the ground, with the likes of Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Penélope Cruz, and Édgar Ramírez all attached at various points. At long last, it finally looks to be heading into production this spring with a new lead.
Elizabeth Olsen will now be leading the project, according to a new casting notice. The story follows 11-year-old Junior, a delusional aspiring Broadway star with an inappropriate obsession with his mother (Olsen). After orchestrating an accident that nearly kills his abusive father, he encourages the handsome man living in the family’s guesthouse to court his mother and become his new dad. But when the two fall in love, Junior becomes so jealous that he is no longer the subject of his mother’s attention that he hatches a plan to frame the man for his father’s murder.
The casting notice at Back Stage is for Junior, giving a few more details for the character: “Junior loves Broadway musicals and his beautiful mother (Olsen). He hates his tough-as-nails father, country music, and anyone who gets in the way of what he wants. Very emotional, clever, sensitive, precocious, outspoken, manipulative, sweet, conniving and complicated.”
“It’s fun and it’s sexy and it’s shaped by the Hollywood movies that made me want to become a filmmaker,” Solondz