Writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s follow-up to last year’s Oscar-nominated Biutiful, which won Javier Bardem the Best Actor award at Cannes, is starting to take shape very nicely, with Deadline reporting that having finalised a deal with New Regency to fully fund The Revenant, the director has now set his eyes on Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn for the two leads.
The director has worked with Penn before already on the critically-acclaimed 21 Grams, which earned Penn a BAFTA nomination, and the prospect of these three men working together on this sounds pretty damn amazing.
“DiCaprio is being courted to play 1820s frontiersman Hugh Glass, who hires on to a fur trapping expedition and is so badly mauled by a bear that he’s unable to be transported back from the wilderness. He hires two men to stay behind. Expecting him to die, they rob and abandon him instead, leaving him helpless. When he recovers, he is hellbent on revenge. Inarritu wants Penn to play one of the men who left him for dead.”
It’s excellent to see that DiCaprio is diving into these darker roles recently, with his signing on to Tarantino’s Django Unchained to play the slave ranch-running villain being perhaps the epitome of this, and I really hope that talks with both DiCaprio and Penn go well, because seeing the former dedicating himself to revenge against the latter sounds pretty immense.
DiCaprio will next be seen in the hotly Oscar-tipped J. Edgar on 20th January, and with both their schedules currently a little busy – DiCaprio working on Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby adaptation, followed by Django Unchained next year; and Penn working on Ruben Fleischer’s The Gangster Squad – filming may have to wait until autumn next year. But given how amazing DiCaprio and Penn both are, it certainly sounds like it would be well worth the wait to see the pair together on screen in a project like this. As always, more news as we get it.
