Rose Byrne looks set to be joining Steve Carell in Jon Stewart’s new political satire, Irresistible.
Variety reported in October (18) that former The Daily Show host Stewart was eyeing up Carell for his new project, his first since 2014’s Rosewater. And now Collider reports Byrne is also joining the cast of Irresistible.
Sources tell the website that the film follows a slick Democratic strategist (Carell) who helps a retired veteran run for Mayor in a small, right-wing town in Wisconsin, which is a swing state. Byrne is close to finalising a deal to play Carell’s cut-throat Republican counterpart who campaigns on behalf of the local mayor.
Production is slated to kick off this spring, with Focus Features the likely contender to make it. Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment will be producing, along with Stewart, who is also writing the script.
It marks Stewart’s second foray into filmmaking. He handed over The Daily Show reigns to Trevor Noah in 2015, weeks before Rosewater premiered at the Telluride Film Festival but has been laying low on the Hollywood front ever since.
Talking about how Rosewater, a film about real-life Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari who was detained by Iranian forces and brutally interrogated, came about, Stewart previously revealed it was an “organic” process, rather than him purposefully seeking out a writing and directing career.
“Maziar would come through New York, and we would have breakfast and talk about writing his memoir,” he recalled. “We talked about how to make it into a film, but more as producers, and as we sent it around to various writers who were already more gainfully employed than how we could employ them… We just got frustrated that it was a year and a half and there was very little movement. That’s really what drove the initial impulse to write it. Directing grew out of becoming slightly territorial at that point.”
