Midnight Mass’ Alex Essoe and Station Eleven’s Daniel Zovatto are joining Russell Crowe in the Screen Gems supernatural thriller The Pope’s Exorcist, Deadline reports.

The film, directed by Julius Avery, will see Crowe portray real-life figure and legendary Italian priest Father Gabriele Amorth, a man who reportedly performed over 100,000 exorcisms for the Vatican over his sixty-plus years of service to the Church. The script draws from his international bestselling memoirs An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories. Father Amorth, who died in 2016, left behind a stack of additional accounts of his experiences banishing the devil all over the world.

Evan Spiliotopoulos wrote the current screenplay with revisions by Chuck MacLean, itself based on Michael Petroni-revised original drafts by Chester Hastings and R. Dean McCreary. Voices director Ángel Gómez was previously attached to direct the film.

Who Alex Essoe and Daniel Zovatto might play is not yet known. Essoe is best known for her collaborations with Mike Flanagan on the acclaimed supernatural horror series Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor, as well as on his The Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep, in which she played Wendy Torrance. Meanwhile, Zovatto has appeared in series like Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and films including Don’t Breathe and It Follows.

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