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Liam Neeson & Cedric the Entertainer Join Lee Daniels' Selma

by Ethan Anderton
March 25, 2010

Just last week Lee Daniels found his Martin Luther King Jr. in David Oyelowo, now he's found two more actors for key roles in his civil rights drama Selma. MTV spoke with Daniels who revealed Liam Neeson and Cedric the Entertainer (seriously, can't he have a real name now?) have joined the cast. Neeson will play President Lyndon B. Johnson and Cedric will play American civil rights movement leader and MLK's right hand man Ralph Abernathy. However, as we previously speculated, it looks like Robert De Niro may not be film as Daniels states: "Wallace is not [cast], but [an offer is] out. We're waiting for a deal to close."

It sounds like they've offered the role to another actor since the last we heard from Daniels himself was De Niro was on-board, so things have probably changed since then. As a quick recap, Selma will encompass the five-day, four-night protest march against those who were not in support of passing the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 that started in Selma, Alabama as well as the events leading up to it. It'll be interesting to see Cedric the Entertainer in such a pivotal role in an intense historical drama, to say the least. There hasn't been a film that has tackled the civil rights movement so directly, so I'm excited to see how Daniels will tackle this material. Stay tuned!

Explore tags: Casting, Movie News, Opinions

Crump's Brother

Sounding pretty good.
Noah

The final march from Selma to Montgomery was a march made IN SUPPORT OF the Voting Rights Act, not AGAINST it like you say here. The bloody images flooding people's television screens leading up to that final march, and the tensions spreading across Alabama are what finally called Johnson to publicly call Congress to act, and sign the most sweeping voting rights legislation our country had seen since reconstruction. MLK n' them weren't hardly against that.