Disney to release film on October 9, 2015.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Walt Disney Studios announced on Tuesday that it has cast the lead actor in its new live-action adaptation of “The Jungle Book” – Neel Sethi.
The Indian American youngster, who is just 10 years old, has been selected to essay the lead role of Mowgli in the new film version of Rudyard Kipling’s immortal 1894 collection of stories, reports Variety. Disney has already turned the book into two movies – a 1994 live-action feature and, more famously, a 1967 animated film – but their new version will be a little mix of both.
Sethi, who has never acted in a movie before, will be the only actor seen on-screen for the entire duration of the film. All of the animals that he interacts with will be created via Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), similar to the work that actor Suraj Sharma did in the 2011 film Life of Pi, which won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work in digitally creating realistic animals.
The search to find Sethi, who is from New York, was an extensive one, with thousands of young boys auditioning from the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand. The film’s casting director, Sarah Finn, said in a statement that Sethi has “the heart, humor, and daring of the character. He’s warm and accessible, yet also has an intelligence well beyond his years and impressed us all with his ability to hold his own in any situation. Even though he has no professional acting experience, his natural charisma and instincts jumped out at us.”
The new version of The Jungle Book, which just recently went into production, will hit screens around the world on October 9. It is being directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Iron Man 2), and will feature the voices of Idris Elba (Pacific Rim) as the villainous Shere Khan, Oscar-winner Sir Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) as the panther Bagheera, Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers), and Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave).