Today you can add one more to the ever growing cast of Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Variety is telling us that actor Rufus Sewell has joined the cast and will play the main villain, the vampire that is being hunted. Slated for a June 22, 2012 release, the film stars Benjamin Walker, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anthony Mackie, Alan Tudyk, Jimmi Simpson and Dominic Cooper. Sewell makes a great addition to an already strong cast and with the roles of Edgar Allen Poe, Ann Rutledge and John Wilkes Booth to be filled, you can be sure to hear more casting news shortly.
Sewell is probably best known for the fantastic Dark City but he’s a pretty accomplished actor who has given a number of strong and notable performances. For those unfamiliar with the the film, it’s based off of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel of the same name and Amazon gives the following summary:
Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.”
“My baby boy…” she whispers before dying.
Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.
When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.
While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.
Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.