Kid 'Jeopardy' contestant lands lead role in 'Extremely Loud'

By Sarah Sluis

In a most creative casting decision, a thirteen-year-old winner of "Jeopardy" will star in Paramount and Warner Bros.' Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Horn will play a precocious, intelligent boy whose father died on 9/11. After finding a mysterious lock, he searches through New York City for the key, making some memorable encounters along the way. Though the boy is twelve, he can pass for younger, and the role seems quite challenging for such a young actor.

As written in Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, the boy has a college-level vocabulary and the inquiring mind and silly questions of a child. He also is so scientific, so unemotional, he seems like he might have some kind of borderline autism like Asperger's Syndrome. The dialogue is really hard to pull off (check out an excerpt here), and the boy in general (in my opinion) comes off as less than charming, though I'm not part of the majority of people who actually finished the book.

Now that the boy's been cast alongside Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks, it's time to jump the gun: will this movie be groomed for an Oscar pedigree? Given that producer and Oscar winner Scott Rudin will be overseeing, three-time Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry will direct, and the script was penned by Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth, it seems like Extremely Loud wouldn't shoot for anything less. In the project's favor, Daldry directed (but did not write) Billy Elliot, which had a fantastic child actor matched with great dialogue and direction.

Could 9/11 be the new Holocaust, that historical tragedy that has yielded such Oscar winners/nominees as The Reader, Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, and Defiance? (That's just the shortlist). So far the subject has been rather unexplored, with just fact-based United 93 hitting theatres. They're going to have to start filming soon before this boy hits puberty, so it's only a matter of time before this movie hits theatres and tests audiences' willingness to see a film about our national tragedy.