Casting Couch: Fortunas Rise for Dominic Monaghan

Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez team up for big-screen thriller set in a post-economic collapse world

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but no thriller is scarier than our current economic crisis. At least not according to the suits who run Hollywood.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez have signed on to star in Fortuna, a horror flick set in the not-too-distant future of 2100, when global economic and climate crises lead to the elimination of the middle class, leaving only the megarich and the severely poverty stricken.

Talk about fingers on the pulse.

The forthcoming flick centers on the creation of a bizarre game dubbed Fortuna, which awards one dirt-poor citizen a major payout and the opportunity to join the upper class, but whose contestants seem to mysteriously disappear.

Cameras roll on the thriller in Bulgaria next month.

Meanwhile, on a slightly more feel-good note...

• Oscar winner Forest Whitaker seems primed to take another run at the shiny bald man with his next double-duty project, directing and starring in the Louis Armstrong biopic What a Wonderful World. Per Variety, Whitaker teams with the producers of La Vie en Rose for the project, which shoots in Louisiana next summer and is the first biopic authorized by the Armstrong estate.
• Gather the teapots—The Tempest is brewing with some of Britain's finest. Reigning Queen Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Russell Brand, Ben Whishaw, Djimon Hounsou and Alfred Molina have signed on to star in the big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare's stranded-on-an-island comedy. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Mirren will take on the male lead, playing exiled duke Prospera. Geoffrey Rush is in talks to join to the film, directed by Julie Taymor. Cameras roll next month in Hawaii.
• Lance Bass is clearly trying to usurp some of the Cody Linley vote, taking his Dancing shoes over to the Disney Channel to guest star in Wilmer Valderrama's animated series Handy Manny. Bass will take on the recurring role of klutzy yet good-natured "surfer dude" Elliott, beginning Friday.
• Mark Wahlberg is going behind the scenes for HBO again. He's hired former October Road's Bryan Greenberg and Stop-Loss' Victor Rasuk for the comedy pilot How to Make It in America, per the Hollywood Reporter, revolving around two twentysomethings who hustle their way through life in New York.