I posted an article late March about Wes Bentley – how great he looked in Spain promoting his new film There Be Dragons, and how candid he’s been about how he f-cked up his life after early success. Click here for a refresher, including his candid NY Times interview in which he details his struggle with heroin addiction, and how he lost everything and had to start over.

Starting over is going well so far. Yesterday it was confirmed that Bentley has been cast in The Hunger Games as Seneca Crane, the Head Gamemaker in the first book. Conveniently, yesterday Wes was in New York to present There Be Dragons. Good for him. I wonder if it’ll be a lesson for others at all. Bentley has said that if only his story could have been told to him before it all went down:

“This would have helped me, at least, if someone would have made me realize that you don't need to do drugs to be artistic and express yourself. If you want to be artistic, if you want to be creative, if you want to express yourself, you can't let things get in your way, and drugs are included in that.”

It makes me sad that there are people out there who still believe that. And there are many of them. This is not a myth.

As for what to expect from Wes in The Hunger Games, he told the NY Post that:

“You know, I can't really talk about the script because he's a little bit different in it then (sic) he is in the books. But he is absolutely an interesting character, very conflicted – I like playing that. Deciding what choices are good or bad and [in turn] what that means for him.”

Ok, that’s great, and I am truly happy for him but does it sometimes bug when they assign more meaning and depth to characters that were essentially meant to be one dimensional?


Photos from Stephen Lovekin/Gettyimages.com