Ari Aster’s Scapegoat has added three more names to its growing ensemble.
Ella Purnell, Caleb Landry Jones and Samba Schutte have all joined the film, adding to a cast that already includes Scarlett Johansson and Jacob Elordi, with Jude Law having entered talks for the project earlier this week. Deadline broke the casting news on Friday.
Ari Aster is writing and directing the film, producing alongside Lars Knudsen through their Square Peg banner, with A24 distributing. Scapegoat will mark Aster’s fifth feature and his fifth consecutive film released through A24, following Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid and Eddington.
As with the earlier casting announcements, plot details remain entirely under wraps, and the theories currently circulating do not agree with one another. Some have speculated that the story centers on a doctor operating on an internet celebrity, while others believe it is a science-fiction romance. Some reports have suggested it may instead be a straightforward drama without any genre elements at all. What is confirmed is the shape of the production itself: filming is expected to begin later this year, with some reports specifically pointing to a November start date.
Ella Purnell brings her own strong genre credentials to the project. Best known for playing Lucy MacLean in Amazon’s Fallout, she also appeared in Zack Snyder’s zombie heist film Army of the Dead and spent the Starz series Sweetpea playing a mild-mannered woman who turns out to have a real talent for killing people.
Caleb Landry Jones arrives with arguably the deepest genre résumé of the three new additions, having played Jeremy Armitage in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, led Brandon Cronenberg’s body-horror film Antiviral and taken on the title role in Luc Besson’s Dracula last year.
Samba Schutte, the least established of the three by name recognition, has built his career through HBO Max’s Our Flag Means Death and is currently appearing in Vince Gilligan’s Apple TV+ series Pluribus.
The cast’s existing stars continue to bring their own notable context to the project. Scarlett Johansson leads the film, marking her first project with A24 since 2013’s Under the Skin, still widely regarded as one of the strangest and most unconventional choices of her career relative to her usual studio profile.
Jacob Elordi joins straight off his acclaimed performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, continuing what looks increasingly like a run of choosing projects based on the director attached rather than the specific role on offer.
In an interesting side note that underscores just how tightly Ari Aster is guarding this project, the filmmaker revealed back in June that he has already written a prequel to Hereditary, but has no current plans to actually make it, leaving that finished screenplay shelved while the far more secretive Scapegoat moves toward production instead.
No release date has been set for the film yet, and Ari Aster’s team has given no indication of when more plot details might emerge.
With its cast now spanning six notable performers across horror, prestige drama and genre television, and virtually nothing confirmed about what the film is actually about, Scapegoat continues to be one of the most tightly guarded and closely watched original projects currently in development at A24.