Update: An Instagram post (via Vineland Updates) from Melis Duenas suggests they’ve joined Anderson’s new feature alongside Dijon Duenas and Sachi DiSerafino. See below for original story.
With production beginning in Northern California for Paul Thomas Anderson’s next feature, the casting announcements are finally starting to flow in. After Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, and Sean Penn were announced, we learned this week that newcomer Chase Infiniti is part of the ensemble.
Now, THR reports Licorice Pizza star Alana Haim will join the project, alongside Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One), Wood Harris (The Wire, Creed), and Shayna McHayle aka Junglepussy (Support the Girls).
The recent set photos have also further fueled much speculation that Paul Thomas Anderson is taking on a contemporary update of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, shifting its 1984-set depiction of Reagan’s reign of terror to the MAGA state of today. If this proves to be the case, we would imagine DiCaprio takes the lead Zoyd Wheeler role, Regina Hall is Frenesi Gates, Chase Infiniti is their daughter Prairie, and Sean Penn plays the villainous Brock Vond.
As we await more details, here’s the synopsis of Vineland as a refresher:
Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs (“Floozy with an Uzi”), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).