There’s something endlessly nightmarish about the films of Ari Aster, whether he’s operating in the realm of demonic possession, as in Hereditary, or something far scarier, like the social media hellscape of his latest, last year’s Eddington. Now, Jude Law has just become the latest Hollywood actor to willingly subject himself to one of Aster’s emotional dystopias, with The Wrap reporting that Law has entered negotiations to appear in Aster’s mysterious latest film, A24 production Scapegoat.
Details about the movie are basically nil at this point, although rumors have been swirling. (At least one plot synopsis circulating online has suggested it’ll be about a surgeon who accidentally kills an internet celebrity on the operating table, and is forced to deal with the consequences; beyond sounding like what we’d characterize as “some general Ari Aster shit,” though, there’s no official confirmation that that hypothetical logline has anything to do with the actual movie the writer-director is working on.)
Really, the only thing we do know about Scapegoat at this point is casting, as Law potentially joins a cast that includes fellow newcomers Scarlett Johansson and Jacob Elordi. (Aster hasn’t hurt for casting talent since pretty much the moment he released Hereditary, of course—and doubly so after giving Johansson’s old Black Widow buddy Florence Pugh a hugely memorable starring part in 2019’s Midsommar.)
Law, for his part, has spent the last few years bouncing between TV and film. Between Netflix’s Black Rabbit and Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, he’s been well-represented on streaming screens in recent days; his latest film role, meanwhile, was as Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard Of The Kremlin. There’s absolutely no word yet on what kind of part he’s mulling over for Scapegoat; his skill set runs the gamut from convincingly playing a victim of a tragic misunderstanding to being the face of malevolent, dead-eyed persecution, though, so it’ll be fascinating to see how Aster uses him to make his nightmares even worse.
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