Rid­ley Scott eyes Jodie Com­er for the female lead in his Napoleon epic

Ridley Scott cur­rent­ly has a lot of irons in the fire. He’s putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on his peri­od epic set in 14^th-cen­tu­ry France, deep into shoot­ing on his dra­ma about the killing of Guc­ci with Lady Gaga, bat­ting around ideas for sequels to Glad­i­a­tor and Alien: Covenant, and attached to a bare­ly-exis­tent espi­onage pic­ture called Queen & Coun­try. But today brings news about yet anoth­er ges­tat­ing project, his long-in-the-works Napoleon biopic Kit­bag, which gained a female lead just last night.

Dead­line has revealed that Scott has tapped Jodie Com­er for the role of Josephine, the squat-statured megalomaniac’s long­time lover. She land­ed the role on the mer­it of her more recent per­for­mance in Scott’s soon-to-come The Last Duel, in which she so impressed the direc­tor (who, the Dead­line item spec­i­fies, had nev­er heard of her when he cast her as that film’s lead­ing lady) that he approached her on set about reteam­ing for anoth­er production.

She’ll play oppo­site Joaquin Phoenix, who stars as the attempt­ed con­queror of Europe, despite the mat­ter of height. Here at LWLies HQ, we’ve been pon­der­ing how Phoenix – who stands at a rather aver­age 172 cm, mean­ing he’d tow­er over the famous­ly slight Bona­parte – will star oppo­site Com­er, who’s list­ed as the same height, and who’ll play some­one sup­posed to be short­er than her man. If the fates be kind, some­one will have to get their face awk­ward­ly copy-past­ed onto the head of a per­former with more appro­pri­ate gait.

But at any rate, their dynam­ic will be a fiery one; the his­tor­i­cal record paints their rela­tion­ship as ​“volatile,” an intense bond that informed many of the world-shap­ing deci­sions he’d make on his cam­paign for total dom­i­na­tion. A cur­so­ry descrip­tion of the film’s plot makes it sound like we’ll fol­low the boy who would take over Europe from his ear­li­est ori­gins through to the height of his pow­er, his rela­tion­ship to Josephine being the main con­stant dur­ing this tur­bu­lent time.

Scott plans to give us a look at his work with Com­er through The Last Duel’s release come fes­ti­val sea­son lat­er this year (a thing that looks increas­ing­ly like­ly to actu­al­ly hap­pen, saints pre­serve us), with Kit­bag safe­ly expect­ed for 2022. At eighty-three years old, Rid­ley Scott’s an inspi­ra­tion to us all, a liv­ing tes­ta­ment to the fact that old age needn’t stop any of us from devel­op­ing six movies at dif­fer­ent stages of pro­duc­tion simultaneously.