Discussion: What Role Will Theo James Play in ‘War on Everyone’?

It’s been four days now since we found out that Theo James had been cast in the new John Michael McDonagh directed movie, ‘War on Everyone’, yet there is not much we know about the movie itself or what will be the nature of Theo’s involvement in the film. Because of its IMDB page and the press release from the New Mexico Film Office, we know that the film is about the following:

Two corrupt cops in New Mexico set out to blackmail and frame every criminal unfortunate enough to cross their path. Things take a sinister turn, however, when they try to intimidate someone who is more dangerous than they are. Or is he?

But that doesn’t really tell us much in the way of what our favorite guy will be doing, or who he will be playing…

In an old (July 10, 2014) interview with “The Playlist”, Director John Michael McDonagh discussed this project back when only Michael Pena had been cast and Alexander Skarsgard’s part had originally been offered to Garret Hedlund. He explained that the movie will be “about two corrupt cops who go around blackmailing criminals and ripping them off. And they eventually cross a criminal who’s more dangerous than they are…or is he? So it’s ‘The French Connection‘ but with more jokes.”

The part of this interview that I found more enlightening, however, is where The Playlist states that last they had heard, the part of the villain was still up for grabs and that McDonagh was reportedly looking for a British actor to play the role. Sound familiar? Anyone we know?

“I haven’t actually cast it yet…” he said, “But it’s funny—I’m not a big fan of actors who do accents, I always think you should get the nationality, if it’s British get a British guy. But there are some actors who’ve got a great facility for accents, and so actually I’ve been talking to Guy Pearce. I’ve found a lot of Australian actors have a great facility for both English and American accents, whereas a lot of English actors doing American accents, it just sounds odd.”

“Australians though,” he continued, “I guess that’s why they can be so successful in Hollywood, people like Chris Hemsworth… So yeah, talking to Guy Pearce. The villain is basically a completely degenerate Lord who takes heroin and sets up robberies, but then he turns out to be a lot darker than we thought and it goes into a very dark area towards the end of the movie. So that would be tonally a trick line to walk.”

So this statement actually gives us a lot to go on. Although he mentions Guy Pearce by name, that is just who he was thinking of talking to at the time of this interview and doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who was chosen. In fact, we know that he was not cast as his name appears nowhere on the  press release. What we can definitely gather from the above statement is that the role of the villain is a British guy, and that the Director has a preference for casting actors who are the same nationality of the character in the role that they play. We also now know that this villain character is “a completely degenerate Lord who takes heroin and sets up robberies, but then he turns out to be a lot darker than we thought and it goes into a very dark area towards the end of the movie”. This totally sounds like something I would love to see Theo in. It would be something so completely different than anything he’s done before!

So I think that we have a very good chance here to see Theo in a villain role, and not just any villain either. Let us know what you think below in the comments. Would you like to see Theo venture into more different types of roles and diversify his career?