Martin Scorsese finds someone else to star in his Jesuits-in-Japan movie Silence

Martin Scorsese’s Catholic Church film Silence (yes, another Italian gangster movie) has found its star—several years after already finding its stars in Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio Del Toro, then losing them to time and other projects. Instead, the role of the Jesuit priest who preaches Christianity to a hostile, 17th-century Japan population will now be played by Andrew Garfield, whose performance in The Amazing Spider-Man already proved he’s good with desperately clinging to things. As in the Shusaku Endo novel Silence is based on, Garfield’s Father Rodrigues, aided by a translator played by Ken Watanabe, will travel to a nation where religious persecution is rampant to investigate reports that his mentor has abandoned his faith, in a story that Scorsese—though mindful of the admittedly smaller audience who will likely see his mostly Japanese-language film—nevertheless argues is “a thriller. Thriller meaning they are undercover. I’m interested in this, whether it’s undercover priests or undercover cops.” And yet it apparently never occurred to him he could probably clean up by just calling his movie Undercover Priest. (“In The Name Of The Father, The Son, And Gettin’ It Done.”—tagline Scorsese can have, if he wants.)