Combining the words Allison Janney with indie comedy is usually music to my ears. In the last few years alone, she's rocked roles like Allie Stiffle in Chumscrubber and Bren MacGuff in Juno. Now The Hollywood Reporter posts that she's signing on for two bigger-budget roles -- one that will have her working with Sam Mendes, and the other that will have her directed by Brian Robbins. Well, at least one should be completely excellent. For Mendes, she's taking a role in his upcoming comedy, which is currently and tentatively titled This Must Be the Place. Janney will play "a loud, brassy, decidedly un-PC woman who admittedly has a few screws loose." (Could Mendes have cast that any better?) "She reunites with a former employee in Phoenix, where the expectant mother/employer (Maya Rudolph) begins a tour of the country with her husband (John Krasinski) to find the best place to raise their child."
For Robbins, she's taking part in A Thousand Words -- the comedy where Eddie Murphy finds out that he has exactly one thousand words to speak before he dies. She'll play his boss in the comedy, "a savvy, money-grubbing head of a literary agency." Heh. What's worse than only having a thousand words left to speak? Having this happen when your work relies on words.
But the best casting is what comes after these shoots in LA and Arizona -- she's got a gig in the Broadway adaptation of 9 to 5. That is such ridiculously perfect casting.
