Five days until Brainiac hits shelves! I don’t fly out to New York until Sunday, but the days are starting to fill up with phone interviews and pre-interviews and pre-pre-interviews. Deja vu all over again. Yesterday, one guy from the Rocky Mountain News sounded pretty disappointed when I didn’t have trivia facts ready for him, on the spot, about the great city of Denver. Note to self: study up on reporters’ home cities before each interview.

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Variety is reporting (see here if you don’t subscribe) that Kenneth Branagh is remaking one of my favorite movies: the 1972 puzzle-thriller Sleuth, with Jude Law taking the old Michael Caine part (the upstart hairdresser) and Caine shifting over, like an old infielder moving over to first when he doesn’t have the legs to play shortstop anymore, to take the Olivier role (the imperious detective novelist). No word on who will play the Alec Cawthorne part…some up-and-comer, one assumes.

There’s plenty to say about this Sleuth–Isn’t Caine now horribly miscast in the Olivier role? Does Sleuth’s crucial third-act twist even work on the big screen, especially now in the savvy digital age (when “better than Dietrich’s Cockney accent in Witness for the Prosecution” doesn’t really cut it)? Shouldn’t Branagh be directing more Shakespeare-lite, like the criminally underrated Love’s Labour’s Lost or the upcoming As You Like It? Will we finally get a decent Sleuth DVD out of all this?–but I’m more interested in a couple avenues of trivia inquiry opened by this announcement.

First, this makes Jude Law’s second go at reprising an iconic Michael Caine performance (the first, of course, being 2004’s Alfie). Are there other cases of an actor appearing in two remakes, filling roles originated by the same actor?

Second, in re: Caine’s performance. Can you think of other examples of the same kind of stunt casting, in which an actor returns to a remake years later, and switches over to another role because he’s too old to reprise the original role?