Dakota Fanning cast in Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Emma Thompson and Dakota Fanning  / Effie Gray

Dakota Fanning has been cast to star as Susannah Cahalan in Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness. Charlize Theron’s Denver and Delilah has optioned Cahalan's best selling memoir that follows her own terrifying descent into insanity. 

 This is how the book begins -  

“Maybe it all began with a bug bite, from a bedbug that didn’t exist.One morning, I’d woken up to find two red dots on the main purplish-blue vein running down my left arm. It was early 2009, and New York City was awash in bedbug scares: they infested offices, clothing stores, movie theaters, and park benches. Though I wasn’t naturally a worrier, my dreams had been occupied for two nights straight by finger-long bedbugs. It was a reasonable concern, though after carefully scouring the apartment, I couldn’t find a single bug or any evidence of their presence. Except those two bites. I even called in an exterminator to check out my apartment, an overworked Hispanic man who combed the whole place, lifting up my sofa bed and shining a flashlight into places I had never before thought to clean. He proclaimed my studio bug free. That seemed unlikely, so I asked for a follow-up appointment for him to spray. To his credit, he urged me to wait before shelling out an astronomical sum to do battle against what he seemed to think was an imaginary infestation. But I pressed him to do it, convinced that my apartment, my bed, my body had been overrun by bugs. He agreed to return and exterminate.”

She sure is bugged by the possibility of those little buggers, isn't she?

Charlize Theron / Dark Places

Theron is stretching her producer muscles and likely won't make an appearance in Brain on Fire; we'll see her this fall in the adaptation of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places with Chloe Grace Moretz, Corey Stoll, and Nicholas Hoult. Dakota Fanning, former child star, has a few projects in the works including the Emma Thompson scripted Effie Gray, the story of Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his child bride, Effie Gray. I'm so excited to see what Thompson, such an outspoken feminist and critic of the status quo - makes of it. Before that try and find Every Secret Thing playing somewhere. Supposedly out in theaters now, Every Secret Thing, based on Laura Lippman's novel, was scripted by Nicole Holofcener who wrote the beautiful Enough Said. I would love to check out the trailer but I can't find one anywhere.