Cameron Diaz Is Playing Miss Hannigan in the Weird and/or Cool 'Annie' Movie
Cameron Diaz is going to be the sexiest Miss Hannigan ever. Yes, after Sandra Bullock passed, Nikki Finke of Deadline reports that Diaz is taking over the key villain role in the Jay-Z and Will Smith produced adaptation of the 1977 musical Annie. So this movie is shaping up to have a starry, kind of bizarre cast.
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Diaz is certainly an interesting choice for a role that has been played by the likes of Dorothy Loudon, Carol Burnett, Kathy Bates, and, currently on Broadway, Jane Lynch. Productions have oscillated between casting Miss Hannigan as a washed-up sexpot and, well, a Kathy Bates type. In her big number Little Girls, Hannigan sings: "I'm an ordinary woman / With feelings / I'd like a man to nibble on my ear / But I'll admit no man has bit / So how come I'm the mother of the year?" Diaz does sexpot well, just in a way that's perhaps more overt than any Miss Hannigan before her. But there may be something to the casting, which Finke called an "inspired choice"—the role is perhaps an ancestor of her Bad Teacher character.
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But can she sing? Miss Hannigan requires a big belt, which in some cases can be faked, but Diaz's most famous musical number involves a particularly bad bit of karaoke in My Best Friend's Wedding; her voice was dubbed for in The Mask. Meanwhile, we've got youngest ever Oscar nominee for Best Actress, Quvenzhané Wallis, in the lead role, Jamie Foxx playing a man who will apparently not be called Daddy Warbucks, and a new Miss Hannigan in the form of Cameron Diaz, whose singing may not end up being as important as how she rounds out this cast and what it means for this potentially bizarre and/or awesome adaptation of a classic.
