Scott Cooper’s Netflix horror movie The Pale Blue Eye has added more high-profile stars to an already considerably stacked cast. The film stars Christian Bale as a detective investigating a series of murders and Harry Melling as a fictional version of Edgar Allan Poe. It has also now added Gillian Anderson, who can currently be seen in Hulu’s The Great, as the mother of Elle Fanning’s Catherine the Great.
And the impressive roster of names continues with Robert Duvall and Timothy Spall also being new additions to the cast. The ensemble cast previously announced includes Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney and Fred Hechinger.
The film focuses on an attempt to solve a fictitious series of murders that took place at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1830, where Edgar Allan Poe was a young cadet. Cooper adapted the screenplay for The Pale Blue Eye from Louis Bayard’s historical fiction novel of the same name.
Scott Cooper’s long-delayed horror movie Antlers, starring Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons, was finally released in time for Halloween 2021. The Pale Blue Eye will be the third collaboration between Bale and Cooper after they previously worked on the Western Hostiles and the crime thriller Out of the Furnace.
In the work of historical fiction, The Pale Blue Eye follows Cadet Edgar Allan Poe (played by Melling in the adaptation), a West Point newbie with a taste for alcohol and French phrases. He becomes the sidekick of a retired, widowed New York City police constable named Gus Landor (played by Bale), hired by the academy to investigate the death of a cadet who was found hanged. The body goes missing and when it is recovered, the heart has been carved out of the chest.
Harry Melling has successfully shed his association with Dudley Dursley by working with some prestigious directors of late, including the Coen brothers, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Antonio Campos, as well as on the smash-hit Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, which won 11 Emmy awards. Christian Bale was most recently seen in Adam McKay’s Vice and James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari.