After he does this one movie, that's it. It can never get better. Also today: Natalie Portman might be shot into space and left there, TV actresses get TV deals, Joan Holloway gets a new assignment, and nerd news.

After much casting foofaraw (Angelina was out! they wanted Sandra in!) it appears that Natalie Portman, getting hot(ter) after the crazy buzzed-about Black Swan, has been offered the big-time lead (it's mostly just her for the whole movie) in Alfonso Cuarón's next movie, Gravity. Portman would play a woman stranded in space, trying to get back to her loved ones. Stranded in a cold, lonely, nerdy place for a long period of time? Natalie knows all about that. She went to Harvard! [THR]

Diane Farr, an actress/writer/whatever else who's made her living on mid-success television shows (Numb3rs, The Job, Californication), has signed a deal with Fox to develop a TV series based on her book You Can't Love One of Them, about interracial marriages in the South. Farr herself married a man of Korean descent and spent years traveling the country talking to mixed-race couples. No word on whether she'll be in the show or not. But good for her! May it be a bigger success than Numb3rs and more well received than The Job. Which, you know, is saying something? [Deadline]

Hey you there, nerd! Come up to the board and do this math problem please. What's that? You can't? Why can't you just stand up and — Ohh. Ohhhh. I see. You've just heard the news that Katee Sackhoff, who played your beloved Starbuck on your favorite show ever Battlestar Galactica, is returning to television, playing a detective on CSI. Maybe this will make up for her disliked run on 24. Anyway, OK, I understand. No math problems for you today. Just sit there quietly and when the bell rings you can go home and... well, Sackhoff. [EW]

Sometimes in an actor's life, maybe only once even, a movie comes along that is so perfectly suited to the actor's exact type that it makes you look up into the heavens and wonder if maybe there isn't some omniscient creator o'erseeing us all, guiding our lives in ways both delicate and grand, urging us along into the future with the light swaddling of the Creator's holy benevolence wrapped 'round us. Sometimes these movies happen. For Keanu Reeves it is a movie called Generation Um.... Yes. A movie with "Um..." in the title, that will now star Keanu Reeves. Could anything be more perfect? Perhaps Generation She-Kraken starring Katherine Heigl. Perhaps Generation Deputy Doofus for Shia LaBeouf. Maybe a Generation Ghostbollocks for Gwyneth Paltrow? These movies could all happen someday. But the point is, right now Keanu Reeves gets his Generation Um.... After he has completed the movie, a staircase will appear in the air and he will ascend it to actor heaven, to be seated at the right hand of Michael Jeter and enjoy actorly bliss for the rest of eternity. (Until Heavenal Warming forces everyone up and out of heaven and into outerspace where they will disappear and become the coronas of faraway stars.) [Variety]

OK, kiddo. New day. How's about you come on up here and show me how to do this equation. C'mon, it's OK, Katee isn't gonna hurt you today, nothing's gonna — Hm? Oh. Oh I see. You've heard the news that Christina Hendricks has joined the cast of Drive, that action thriller with Carey Mulligan, Ryan Gosling, and Bryan Cranston. OK, well. I guess just stay there. I know how Christina Hendricks gets people going. I guess just wait until the day is over and then you can go home and show that 'drick who's boss. [The Wrap]

A couple of casting tidbits: Former House doctor (did she die of lupus?) Jennifer Morrison is said to be "circling" a big role on CBS' hilarious 1996 sitcom How I Met Your Mother. It's a 13-episode stint, so it's not fooling around. I mean, that's like Bonnie Sommerville on Friends territory. Other actresses said to be up for the part are ragin' not-Cajun Minka Kelly and Jacinda Barrett. Jacinda from The Real World: London would fit in very well on a mid-'90s sitcom, I think! [EW] Malin Akerman, the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter of actresses, has been cast alongside Ethan Hawke in the $10M thriller The Numbers Station, about a "disgraced black ops agent" who has to protect a woman (Hawke, one hopes) in the Nevada desert. $10M! I wonder what the actors' salaries are. Let's guess. Ima say... $800k for Hawke and $450k for Akerman. What do you think? Let's just play that game for the rest of the afternoon and blow off work, shall we? Good. [Variety]