Rob Riggle to play Bella Thorne’s dad in first dramatic role

By Caroline Siede | October 9, 2015 | 6:49pm

Aux Features Film

Best known for his time as a correspondent on The Daily Show and currently bringing comic relief to Fox’s NFL Sunday, Rob Riggle is finally going to try his hand at dramatic acting: Deadline reports that Riggle’s been cast as the dad in the upcoming teen romance Midnight Sun. Riggle’s Jack is the caring-but-overprotective father of Katie (Bella Thorne), a 17-year-old with a rare disease that makes her allergic to the sun. Jack “tries his best to give his daughter a good life,” but he’ll likely be displeased when a handsome teen named Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger) comes barreling into it.

Though Riggle’s acting has so far involved comedic turns in sitcoms and movies, he did earn a B.A. in Theater and Film back in the day, so hopefully he has some sense memory training to fall back on. And his choice of first dramatic role might actually be a calculated one. After all, we once called Billy Burke—who played Bella’s dad in the Twilight franchise—“the only actor who emerges relatively unharmed from this toxic cocktail of aesthetic dissonance.”