Coming off an Oscar-winning performance in last year’s The Artist, Jean Dujardin is now in talks to join what is quickly shaping up to be one of the most anticipated films of 2013.
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street already has Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Kyle Chandler attached, and now Variety reports that Dujardin will hopefully be boarding the project as well.
Terence Winter, creator of Boardwalk Empire and writer of The Sopranos, has adapted Jordan Belfort’s original book of the same name, which has the following synopsis courtesy of Waterstones:
“By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…
In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.”
DiCaprio is set to take the lead as Belfort himself, with Dujardin in talks,
“to play Jean-Jacques Handali, a suave Swiss banker involved in laundering illicit funds for the protag’s firm.”
With Scorsese behind the camera, returning to work with Winter (having directed the Boardwalk Empire pilot), and such an incredibly stellar line-up, The Wolf of Wall Street is all but guaranteed to be a total slam dunk.
Scorsese is of course no stranger to the Academy, and a project like this certainly sounds like it has potential to go to the Oscars for a nomination.
No word yet on when we can expect The Wolf of Wall Street, but with production scheduled to get underway towards the end of the summer, let’s hope that we can look forward to it in cinemas towards the end of 2013. More as we get it.
