UPDATE: Director Joe Berlinger has shared a photo of James Hetfield on set as highway trooper Bob Hayward, with Zac Efron as Ted Bundy. See it below.
Well, this is something: Metallica's James Hetfield has joined the cast of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, Voltage Pictures' upcoming thriller about notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. The band confirmed via Twitter that he's filmed several scenes for the film, which stars Zac Efron as the mass murderer. The singer-guitarist will be playing Bob Hayward, the Utah highway trooper who first arrested Bundy in 1975, reports Deadline. You read that right: Sometime in the not-too-distant future, we should get to witness James Hetfield on the silver screen in all his glory, putting the High School Musical star in cuffs.
Hetfield's involvement with the film — which marks his first onscreen portrayal of a person other than himself — is a direct result of his creative ties to Extremely Wicked director Joe Berlinger, who previously directed and produced the thrashers' infamous rock doc, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster alongside the late filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky (and later wrote a book about it, 2014's Metallica: This Monster Lives.)
"Having spent hundreds of hours behind the scenes with James and the rest of Metallica, I have experienced his charisma and powerful presence close up," the director told Deadline. "It seemed only natural that he would bring that same power and magnetism to a dramatic role, so when he agreed to my pitch that he be in the movie, I was thrilled."
Aside from Hetfield and Efron, Extremely Wicked's cast includes Lily Collins, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons, Haley Joel Osment, Kaya Scodelario, Angela Sarafyan, Jeffrey Donovan Terry Kinney and Dylan Baker. The film's release date remains TBA, and there's no trailer as of yet; in the meantime, we'll just have to make do with this über-creepy photo of Efron on-set as Bundy, posted to the actor's Instagram account last week:
