The latest directorial effort in James Franco’s Southern phase, an adaptation of William Gay’s prize-winning debut The Long Home, has landed another big personality in the form of Courtney Love. The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson is already attached as protagonist Nathan Winer, a young carpenter who is hired to work for his father’s murderer, Satanic business tycoon Dallas Hardin. In the process, Winer falls in love with the daughter of a local man, Thomas Hovington, who Hardin is grooming to be a prostitute.
Tim Blake Nelson—an official member of the James Franco BFF Club, as this marks his seventh collaboration with Franco—will play Hovington. Love, who recently completed a recurring run on Empire and was featured in the recent HBO documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck, is set to play Pearl, Hovington’s wife.
The indie film—which Franco will direct, produce and, with his track record of overdoing it, probably fill a number of other positions for—has also landed Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito. Esposito will play William Tell Oliver, who does not own a fried chicken/drug empire but instead hunts the natural drug ginseng for a living. Production on The Long Home, which is being filmed simultaneously with another Franco project, Goat, began in Ohio earlier this week.