
Manny Jacinto, Ben Foster and Fiona Shaw to lead Western comedy The Stalemate
The 37-year-old actor will star opposite the 'Hell or High Water' star, 44, and the 'Andor' actress, 66, in director Nicholas Arioli's upcoming movie, who is working from his own script.
'The Stalemate' - which is currently filming in Santa Fe, New Mexico - follows a robber (Jacinto) and a sheriff (Foster) who, stranded without bullets and miles from town, are forced to negotiate their way through a bizarre and endless standoff in the Old West.
Arioli told Deadline said: 'I spent many years writing this completely absurd movie, and I'm honored to work with such an incredible team who are as excited as I am to bring it to life.
''The Stalemate' is part wacky buddy comedy, part poignant Western elegy - and just straight up a ton of fun. We can't wait to share it!'
The movie is to be produced by Molly Conners and Amanda Bower under the Phiphen banner, alongside Andrew Bosworth of Warden Shortbow, and Cari Tuna.
Meanwhile, Phiphen's Richard J. Berthy, Jane Sinisi, Linda L. Berthy, Wilson Rivas and Alex Spatt will serve as executive producers with Foster, Serkan Piantino, Emma Thorne, Annabel Teal, Christine Yi and Brian Nemes of Gold House, as well as Jimmy Price and Javier Gonzalez.
Conners teased the team knew 'The Stalemate' was 'something special' when they first read Arioli's script.
She said: 'From the moment we read Nick's script, we knew 'The Stalemate' was something special. It's rare to find a story that's this fearless, this funny, and this full of heart.
'We're proud to be supporting Nick with such a strong voice - and thrilled to be making this ride of a movie in Santa Fe.'
Jacinto could most recently be seen in the Disney+ 'Star Wars' show 'The Acolyte', where he played Sith apprentice Qimir/The Stranger.
Reflecting on the series, Jacinto explained the team 'wanted to take a risk' with 'The Acolyte', while retaining the more practical production elements used in the 'Star Wars' Original Trilogy.
Speaking at Star Wars Celebration earlier this month (19.04.25), Jacinto said: 'We wanted to bring something different. We wanted to take a risk and bring it back to the Original Trilogy. We wanted to feel the props, we wanted to interact with the puppets. We wanted to get down and dirty with the choreography.
'I'm just so proud of it.'
Jacinto will next appear in 'Freakier Friday' - the sequel to the 2003 Disney comedy 'Freaky Friday' that will see the return of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis' Anna and Tess Coleman.
The actor previously said he feels honoured to be part of the 'Lohan-aissance'.
Jacinto told Collider: 'I mean, I never thought I'd be a part of the Lohan-aissance.
'She's having a whole revolution of itself, but I remember watching Lindsay as a kid, 'The Parent Trap', 'Mean Girls' and to be able to act opposite her was unreal.'
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The Advertiser
a day ago
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But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked. There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. 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Except this deer, with his enormous antlers, lives in a woods being poisoned by men dumping green carcinogens in the water, the same men running over the buck and his mate with their trucks as they leave. We'll come back to that buck in a moment, but in Rhys Warrington's screenplay, we also have a young mum caring for her child. It is Xana (Roxanne McKee), mum to the bookish Benji (Tom Mulheron), who has just been let down once again by Benji's dad Simon (Alex Cooke), who had promised to take his son to a weekend with Simon's relatives in the country. Rather than disappointing her son, Xana packs Benji into a taxi and head off into the deep forrest home that grandmother Mary (Nicola Wright) lives in. It seems that Simon isn't the only disappointment in the family, as granny's home is full of Benji's awful relatives, like his obnoxious cousin Harrison (Joseph Greenwood) and Harrison's uncaring step-mother Harriet (Samira Mighty). But, as in all good fairy tales, the taxi ride to Granny's house is interrupted, not by a wolf, but by an enormous set of antlers smashing into the taxi head-on. The taxi driver is killed as the giant deer, feral with razor sharp teeth that drip blood, stomps the car's cabin, and Xana and Benji escape, running to Granny's house. But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked. There's been an exciting trend in low-budget horror movies recently when iconic intellectual property, usually the ones associated with sweetness, hits that magic number where it enters into the public domain. Like the 2023 film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Christopher Robin has neglected his animal friends after leaving for college and so they go on a killing rampage. These twisted Winnie films - there's been a bunch of spin-offs and also-rans in the past two years - arrived on the scene just as AA Milne's original book, published in 1926, passed the 95-year mark required for the US public domain. The juggernaut that is Disney couldn't stop enterprising filmmakers jumping on this adaptation bandwagon when Steamboat Willie, the first on-screen appearance of Mickey Mouse, entered public domain in 2014, with recent horror films like Mickey's Slayhouse and Mouseboat Massacre hitting - well, they're not hitting cinemas, they're mostly appearing on horror streaming services like Shudder. Even my childhood favourite TV show characters The Banana Splits went on a malfunctioning animatronic killing spree in 2019's The Banana Splits Movie. 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But Granny has dementia and in her vague moments, seems to be psychically linked to the deer, and it turns out there's a strong family link to the beast and the reason it is haunting the woods and the humans, any humans, it sees as being destroyers. Dan Allen and Rhys Warrington's film is fun, if you like horror, but it's not the tongue-in-cheek horror that usually hits the multiplex cinemas. Bambi doesn't throw off witty one-liners as he despatches his prey, it is kill-and-move-on. The film's technical team is a small crew, the end credits were mercifully short, but they achieve good believable work with their CGI, keeping their scenes dark, only revealing the horror creatures when they need to. Perhaps the small tech crew and judicious withholding is the secret to good CGI, I thought as I recalled how many thousands of names were in the technical credits to the second Wonder Woman or The Flash movies, and remember how butchered and rushed those film's CGI looked.


West Australian
2 days ago
- West Australian
Disney's Beauty And The Beast touring to Crown Theatre Perth with Jayde Westaby as Mrs Potts
Disney's Beauty And The Beast touring to Crown Theatre Perth with Jayde Westaby as Mrs Potts