Casting News: Hendricks in Drive, Renner and Rapace Witch Hunters, Seydoux vs. Bruni in Paris

- Drive just got juicier with Mad Men fixture Christina Hendricks set to join Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaacs and Albert Brooks in the Nicolas Winding Refn film, which shifts into gear at the end of this month. Hendrick's role is unidentified, though The Playlist suggests, following a perusal of the "terrific, noirish script," that she must be the female associate of bank-robber-Mulligan's-boyfriend (presumably played by Isaacs).

This would be a small role for Hendricks, and while she also has a supporting part in Life As We Know It with Katherine Heigl, Leonie (with Emily Mortimer, to be released sometime this year, based on the life of journalist Leonie Gilmour) and Detachment (with Adrien Brody, slated for 2011, a drama centered around the dysfunctional public school system), none of these indicate a breakthrough-into-film opportunity. Hendricks is getting plenty of pop culture second-coming-of-cleavage attention (in her Esquire "Letter To Men" she says no man should be on Facebook, that scotch is the most impressive drink order, and that she wants you to say panties more often), but it will be difficult for her to be seen as anything other than her two greatest assets.

- We already got word about Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters from director Tommy Wirkola (the Norwegian responsible for 2009's comedy/horror Dead Snow and its Nazi zombies), and now Jeremy Renner has revealed that he is being considered for Hansel opposite Noomi Rapace as Gretel. This seemingly random pair makes the fairytale turned comedy - fifteen years later and now chasing witches - much more exciting. With the surge of fairytales and fairytale re-workings coming up, this one will be anything but predictable.

- It goes something like this: The UK Daily Mail reports that Carla Bruni's scenes in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris were all reshot with 25-year-old Lea Seydoux (Oscar Isaac's lover in Robin Hood - he played Prince John, she played Isabella of Angoulême [pictured]; David Fincher also considered her for Lisbeth Salander). Seydoux's rep confirms only that she's been added to the cast. The Daily Mail quoted an unknown source: "Lea’s an absolute star – and looks uncannily similar to Carla in her younger days," but they also referred to Seydoux's role in Robin Hood as a leading one - which it wasn't. Regardless of who-said-what and which woman gets screen time in Midnight in Paris (which is expected to debut in Cannes in May 2011), the fact that France's First Lady is embroiled in a Woody Allen don't-hurt-her-feeling's-tabloid-casting-drama makes American politics look relatively dignified, if only for an instant. UPDATE: Allen spokeswoman Leslee Dart writes: "Carla Bruni has NOT been cut from the film. She has a very minor part and that has not changed at all. Lea Seydoux is also in it but has nothing to do with Carla's part."