What is Casting Couch? It’s the casting news roundup that’s been out of work since casting agents seem to be treating the week between Christmas and New Years as one prolonged food coma. If there’s one thing that Jurassic Park taught us, it’s that nature finds a way. Well, casting finds a way too. In a week where there isn’t any news getting leaked to the trades, leave it to Albuquerque Business First to break a new scoop. The eagle eyes over at The Film Stage noticed that, in an article about how that Michael Fassbender-starring rock and roll comedy called Frank is coming to town to shoot, the local source managed to break the news that Maggie Gyllenhaal is coming to town with it. Her involvement in the film sees her joining a cast that includes not just Fassbender, but two of the young MVPs of 2012, Domhnall Gleeson and Scoot McNairy, as well. Which, you know, makes her one of the luckiest ladies in the world.

What is Casting Couch? It’s the casting news roundup that’s ready for the weekend. Colin Firth is kind of a sneaky hunk. At first glance he’s pretty handsome, but not the most attractive dude in the world, and then he’s got this charm to him that just grows on you until you’ve scrawled his name on all of your Trapper Keepers. He’s such saucy dish that it looks like he can make even a big name star like Nicole Kidman develop a schoolgirl crush. THR is reporting that she liked playing his wife in the recent World War II drama The Railway Man so much that she’s now actively recruiting him to join her in her next project, Before I Go to Sleep. Apparently, Before I Go to Sleep is an adaptation of a S.J. Watson novel about an amnesiac woman whose husband must reintroduce himself to her every morning. Early attempts at titling the film The Rich Man’s 50 First Dates were reportedly rejected by the studio.

The upcoming year looks like it’s going to be a busy one for Michael Fassbender, which probably has something to do with the fact that he’s the greatest (and handsomest) actor currently residing on the planet. He just got done filming Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, he’s now working on the Ridley Scott directed and Cormac McCarthy written The Counselor, he’s been linked to Natalie Portman’s next project, Jane Got a Gun, and there’s always his reprisal of the classic X-Men villain Magneto looming in the future, for the X-Men: First Class sequel Days of Future Past. When you’re a complete stud and acting machine like Fassbender, however, you don’t let something silly like a full schedule stop you from piling more on, so it should come as no surprise that Variety is reporting the übermensch has added another project onto his plate. The latest is an Irish indie called Frank. Coming from a script by Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan, and to be directed by Lenny Abrahamson (whose latest, What Richard Did, is about to debut at TIFF), Frank is the story of an aspiring and naive young musician who gets in over his head after he joins a band led by an eccentric front man. And it turns out Fassbender can carry a tune: