Sienna Guillory ("Love Actually", "Resident Evil: Apocalypse") is in advanced talks to topline Antonio Cuadri's "The Heart of the Earth," the latest addition to Spain's growing stable of bigger-budgeted historical adventure pics reports Variety.

Taking place in Andalusia's Rio Tinto, the second-largest open-cast mine in the world, "Heart" is a heady romancer with a social conscience. It's set in the late 19th century against a background of tensions between the mine's British managers and its dirt-poor Spanish workers. Pic climaxes with the massacre of demonstrating workers by Spanish troops.

Guillory looks set to play Katherine, the English niece of the mine manager, and part of a love triangle. ortuguese thesp Joaquim de Almeida limns a brutal foreman.