Those casting rumors keep coming: last week it was Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese reputed to be considering Johnny Depp to play Frank Sinatra; this week it is Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes reputed to be considering Johnny Depp to play “a boozy small-town preacher” named Jesse Custer in a movie adaptation of Garth Ennis’s 1990s graphic novel Preacher.

“[He’s a] good actor,” Mendes said of Johnny. “He can do anything as far as I’m concerned.” In a recent interview with Sun Media, Mendes said he has “high hopes” for the project. Screenwriter John August (who wrote screenplays for Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and the upcoming Dark Shadows) is currently working on the Preacher screenplay–no easy task, since there were 66 issues of the Preacher comic series. That’s a lot of storyline to adapt. Preacher is the kind of edgy, irreverent satiric tale for which the word “outrageous” was invented: after his congregation is killed by a supernatural creature, the possessed preacher starts walking across the United States in a attempt “to track down a delinquent God.”

The Zone thanks Emma for the article about Preacher; you can read more on the News & Views forum. –Part-Time Poet