Ellen Page As A British Assassin?

The name’s Page…Ellen Page. Or perhaps more accurately Chase, Tara Chase. Wonky though it may sound, Ellen Page is in negotiations to star as a British Special Operations Section (SOS) operative in a movie adaptation of Queen & Country, a comic book by Greg Rucka. Rucka is best known in the comics world for work on on various Batman and Superman books for DC, but Queen & Country comes from an independently published book put out by Oni Press. The series launched in 2001 and ran for six years, focusing on the exploits of the above mentioned Tara Chase, a mix of real-world politics and spy-novel inspired missions.

We’ve seen Page play in roles which required a limited action element before (such as X-Men: The Last Stand and Whip It), but the casting is undoubtedly against type for an actress best known as a quirky pregnant teenager. It makes us curious as to the tone of the final movie; although we’re not familiar with the source material firsthand, it certainly seems to have a hard-nosed bent. Page, on the other hand, would normally seem more at home in Get Smart than Skyfall or even Mission: Impossible. It’s not that Page can’t play serious (see Inception, among others), we just haven’t seen her anchor a role that makes us immediately able to imagine her as super-spy.

The project doesn’t have a director yet, but producers Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping, who have recently collaborated on The Heat and the forthcoming pics St. Vincent de Van Nuys and Exodus, are shepherding it through development with the backing of 20th Century Fox. Likely Fox is looking at this as a potential franchise with crossover appeal to both The Hunger Games and James Bond/Jason Bourne/Ethan Hunt audiences, plus potential to capitalize on Page’s indie following.