Last month, Universal confirmed that it had cast Tom Cruise in 2017's The Mummy. And the studio’s monster madness continues with similarly massive star power, with the news that Johnny Depp has signed on to play the title role in The Invisible Man.
In 1933, James Whale’s adaptation of the 1897 H.G. Wells novel—about a doctor who figures out how to make himself invisible, not realizing that he’ll go stark raving mad as a result—was the US film debut of British actor Claude Rains, whose face was mostly covered in bandages throughout the film. (Horror fans will recall that in 2000, Kevin Bacon starred in another Wells-inspired invisibility-begets-insanity flick, Starship Troopers director Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man.)
Depp, of course, is no stranger to hiding his visage beneath make-up, prosthetics, fake pirate teeth, etc.—but it’ll be interesting to see what approach Universal decides to take, especially since special effects have obviously improved in the past eight decades. Deadline, which nabbed the scoop, had no details on who might direct or when The Invisible Man might be released.