Reports that Wes Anderson was aiming for a scaled-back cast for espionage thriller The Phoenician Scheme may well have been off the mark.

When reports first surfaced that Wes Anderson’s next film would be an espionage thriller, minds were left agog pondering what he was actually up to. After all, Anderson used the iconography of 1950s sci-fi films to unveil something far more intricate with 2023’s Asteroid City, so who knows what Anderson’s good old spy movie could secretly be a Trojan horse for?

One early report we did hear suggested that for this film, Wes Anderson would be scaling back his cast and not working in the same ensemble-driven way that he so often does. That report now looks like it could have been wide of the mark (or perhaps things simply evolved) as the full cast list for the film has now been released and well,...