Jan 31, 2015 13:26
Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire, which compellingly chronicles a month that the author spent in hospital in a baffling psychotic state until a neurologist correctly deduced that she was suffering from a rare type of autoimmune encephalitis, is set to be adapted for film. And Dakota Fanning is going to be playing Cahalan. Learned this today; thought about it, revisited Fanning's Wikipedia page out of sheer curiosity, and concluded that although Fanning is a few years younger than Cahalan was at the time of her illness, the casting choice makes sense for a bunch of reasons. In descending order of importance, here are three of them:
a) We know that Fanning can handle this kind of role: she got a start playing a leukemia patient on ER when she was five.
b) There is actually a fair degree of physical resemblance between Fanning and Cahalan.
c) Fanning also appeared in Man on Fire, so she has experience with movie titles along these lines.