Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, arguably the most anticipated cinematic event of 2019, has now cast its Roman Polanski.
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino's late 1960s Los Angeles crime film, rooted in the story of the Manson Family murders, has tapped Polish actor Rafal Zawierucha for the role of Polanski. Per a late Monday Hollywood Reporterupdate, Zawierucha's addition was announced simultaneously with the joining of Gilmore Girls alum (and Empire co-creator) Danny Strong, as well as Everything Sucks! and Handmaid's Tale standout Sydney Sweeney.
Leonardo DiCaprio leads Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the role of actor Rick Dalton, a former TV star who finds himself struggling to adapt to a changing film industry in 1969. Though we're still short on confirmed plot specifics, we do know that Tarantino took great care to recreate a bygone period of Hollywood history. "It takes place at the time of the hippie revolution and it takes place at the height of the new Hollywood," Tarantino said when surprising CinemaCon attendees back in April. "During this summer, we will little by little, street by street and block by block, be transforming Los Angeles into the psychedelic era in 1969." The film's script, by DiCaprio's estimation, is "one of the most amazing screenplays he's ever written."
Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Margot Robbie, Luke Perry, Dakota Fanning, Lena Dunham, Clifton Collins Jr., and Maurice Compte are among the rest of the film's increasingly stacked cast of fictional and historical characters. Robbie, as previously announced, will play the late actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant and married to Polanski at the time of her murder.
