AceShowbiz - Naomi Watts and Bill Murray are cast to lead the cast of "The Friend". The pair are booked to star in the indie picture based on Sigrid Nunez's New York Times best-selling novel from writer-director duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel.

Other cast members include Sarah Pidgeon, Constance Wu, Ann Dowd, and Noma Dumezweni.

"The Friend" follows a New York writer following the unexpected death of her lifelong pal and mentor as she is left to deal with his complicated literary legacy, three eccentric former wives and a broken-hearted Great Dane called Apollo.

The flick is currently in production in New York and is being produced by McGehee and Siegel for their Big Creek Projects company. Naomi is involved as an executive producer on the film along with Mike Spreter for Big Creek and Margaret Chermin for 3dot Productions.

Watts, 55, explained last year that she was "proud" to still be working in the movie industry after the age of 40 and emphasised that "women's stories don't end at a certain age."

The "Eastern Promises" star told HELLO! magazine, "I'm proud to still be working; when the defining narrative used to be that if you were a hair over 40 you were basically forced into retirement, seeing that shift, that's empowering... There's growing recognition that women's stories don't end at a certain age."

Meanwhile, Naomi recently said that she will "never" get over the death of her father - Pink Floyd sound engineer Peter Watts - from an apparent overdose when she was only seven years of age.

She told Marie Claire Australia magazine, "The grief never goes away but playing [different roles in movies] you find new ways of understanding it. Still to this day as a 55-year-old woman I wish I'd witnessed what it was like to have a father to speak to at various times in my life... I wish that he'd been there to pat me on the back when I've had successful moments or complex moments that I've been troubled by."