John Cusack’s Birthday Greetings to the Late, Great Edgar Allan Poe
Today, January 19th, makes the 202nd anniversary of American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe’s birth; and actor John Cusack took a little time out of his busy schedule filming James McTeigue’s The Raven to tweet some birthday greetings.
Below you’ll find a portrait of Poe along with a behind-the-scenes shot from the set of The Raven. Cusack’s tweets (typos included!) are below each photo.
Also starring Ewan McGregor, Luke Evans, and Alice Eve, The Raven is set in the last days of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, when he gets wrapped up in a serial killer investigation. Evans will play a detective who partners with Poe (Cusack) to search for a serial killer who has kidnapped the author’s fiancee (Eve) and has gone on a murder spree that mimics the author’s work.
“We are planning for a lot of gore,” McTeigue told Dread Central in an earlier interview. “With Poe, I would be remiss in not including some gory stuff, especially within the context of his work. There are so many incredible macabre and paranoid elements in what Poe accomplished as a writer so I want to bring those to the big screen. I want to put audiences in 1850s Baltimore, but the twist is that I want it to come from the way I imagined Poe saw the world, not necessarily what was really happening at that time, and give it a bit of a pop twist on top of that.”
“The Raven will look at a serial killer that uses Poe’s work as inspiration so there will be fictionalized elements to the film. I would still like to stay true to the character he was, but I also don’t want to make a Poe biopic either. So there will be some dark themes running throughout the movie that may just touch on some of what we know about Poe’s life,” McTeigue added.
Happy birthday Poe — hope he see’s the film somewhere —
Comming soon – next fall … Happy birthday Edgar …
P.S. Sadly, the “man in black”, who was a regular visitor to Poe’s Baltimore grave on his birthday since 1949, always leaving three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac, was a no-show again this year, marking the second time in a row the tradition has been broken.
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