Brad Pitt to play Pontius Pilate?

I’m sitting in a bar, waiting for the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards ceremony to begin, but I couldn’t let this news go without blogging for too long. Deadline reports that Brad Pitt is “circling” the title role in Pontius Pilate, the politically-charged historical epic that was first announced last summer. This would not be Pitt’s first ancient epic — he famously starred as Achilles in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) — but it would, as far as I know, be his first foray into explicitly biblical territory. More later, perhaps.