Aaron Paul has a great deal to celebrate when it comes to his birthday today. With his hit show Breaking Bad coming to a nail-biting close, he’s jumping into the feature world, with a lead role in next year’s Need for Speed and the drama A Long Way Down. We’ve now got word on two other upcoming features the actor will take part in, one a major Hollywood production and another a small independent drama.
First up, Variety reports that the star has joined Ridley Scott‘s Christian Bale-led Moses biopic Exodus. Also set to star Joel Edgerton, 20th Century Fox has now added Paul, Sigourney Weaver (in an Alien reunion), John Turturro and Ben Kingsley. Paul will be playing a Hebrew slave, while Weaver and Turturro take the roles of Ramses’ (Edgerton) parents, and Kingsley is eying a role of a Hebrew scholar in the film that begins production next month for a late 2014 release.
The other feature is one that’s secretly already began production in Texas. Following her short film Hellion, director Kat Candler is turning it into a feature-length version. Stopping by the official Breaking Bad podcast, Paul shared details on the film, which sees him team with Juliette Lewis. We’ll let him explain the story below, and one can also see a trailer for Candler’s short and Paul’s Breaking Bad audition tape.
It’s a film called Hellion. It’s the same producing team that did Take Shelter and Mud — it’s their next project. It surrounds this family, this emotionally absent father who is trying to raise these two boys alone because he lost his wife in a tragic car accident a year before the story starts. It’s a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old [and] I play this emotionally absent father whose trying to raise these two boys.
The 13-year-old misses his mom, he doesn’t have really have a father because he’s not there raising them, so he’s just a hellion — lighting cars on fire, just completely out there. It looks like he’s going to drag his young brother with him, who is just this sweet, young, innocent. So the younger boy gets taken away and put into the system because the house that he’s being raised in is just not a good place to be raised in. The story is really the father desperately trying to get his boy back and tame his oldest. It’s a beautiful story.
Are you looking forward to Paul’s involvement in Hellion and Exodus? Have you seen the short?