Justin Long Joins Jenna Ortega and Rose Byrne in Gymnastics Drama Nasty
Justin Long has joined Jenna Ortega and Rose Byrne in the cast of Nasty, a drama directed by Mary Bronstein. The Hollywood Reporter reported the casting on Thursday, 29 October.
The film is being made for Clockwork, the specialty label of Warner Bros. A specialty label is a smaller film arm of a studio, usually focused on films with a more personal or unusual edge than the big franchise releases.
Ortega plays a talented gymnast fighting for a place on the Olympic gymnastics team. Byrne plays a coach who is maternal on the surface but manipulative and exploitative underneath. Long plays her brother, the team's co-coach, who is popular with the gymnasts but has a hidden dark side.
The trade paper describes the film as a Black Swan for competitive gymnastics, a reference to the 2010 ballet thriller that followed a dancer under intense pressure. The screenplay is by Isabella Jarosz, whose script was on the 2024 Black List, an annual survey of the most admired unproduced screenplays in Hollywood.
Tom Ackerley, Bronte Payne and Morgan Begg of the production company LuckyChap are producing alongside Ortega. The project reunites Byrne with Bronstein, who also worked with her on If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Byrne received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in that film.
Shooting is due to begin in mid-November in New Orleans, so the cast and crew will be working in the city within weeks. Long's next screen role is in Amazon MGM's romantic comedy You Deserve Each Other, opposite Penn Badgley and Meghann Fahy.
For a general audience, the casting is a useful marker of how a film comes together. A writer's script gets noticed, a director and an actor with a shared history sign on, and a studio's specialty label takes it on. Then the production moves from paper to the set, with a start date and a location already fixed.
