The casting for Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut continues to heat up. Keke Palmer — the former child star who busted out dramatic chops in Hustlers and will soon appear in Jordan Peele’s next project, Nope — has now joined the Bill-Murray starring dramedy, Being Mortal, which also recently picked up Seth Rogen. As for what roles the actors will be playing… that is anybody’s guess. Ansari is keeping details about the project close to his chest, but we do know that the Searchlight Pictures film is based on the non-fiction book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande.
Logline details for Mortal are being kept in the casket, but the book explored the concepts of death and aging and how the medical profession tends to mishandle both. Searchlight has previously described the project as being at the intersection of “insightful humor and pathos.”
As Master of None fans know, Ansari’s father, who played himself on the Netflix series, is a doctor, so the medical profession isn’t unfamiliar ground for the comedian. Nor is tackling the emotional bonds of life. After the overwhelming response to seeing Ansari’s actual parents on Master of None, the comedian wrote a Tumblr post expressing how great it was to reconnect with them after years of not visiting his hometown as often as he should have.
“What’s strange is doing that episode and working with my parents has increased the quality of my relationship to my parents IN MY REAL LIFE,” Ansari wrote. “In reality, I haven’t always had the best, most open relationship with my parents because we are weirdly closed off emotionally sometimes. But we are getting better.”
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)