Vince Vaughn is currently in talks to join indie film, Lay The Favorite, Variety is reporting.
Already signed on to star are Rebecca Hall (The Town), Bruce Willis (Die Hard), and Justin Timberlake (The Social Network), and I think Vaughn’s addition to the cast would round it off quite nicely.
Lay The Favorite will see director Stephen Frears and writer D.V. DeVincentis working together again after their immensely popular High Fidelity back in 2000, and that fact alone should be enough to whet your appetite. Combine that with the already excellent cast, and we’ve got something great to look forward to next year.
The film will be,
“based on the life of Beth Raymer, a professional gambler who started as a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas but rose to become one of the world’s best gamblers. After falling in love, Raymer begins to re-evaluate her life and the profession she has chosen.”
Raymer’s real-life memoir, Lay The Favorite, came out last year, and Bloomberg describes the memoir tracing her mid-twenties starting out as a graduate waiting tables in Vegas through to her time working for a sports book called ASAP, whose biggest win,
“took place over the nine-day span of the 2004 NBA finals. In one of the biggest upsets in basketball history, the Pistons beat the Lakers in five games and we made one and a half million dollars.”
That’s the kind of thing I’m really looking forward to seeing in this. You just know how well that will translate to the screen. Vaughn’s role in the film isn’t yet known, but it will undoubtedly be quite a prominent one, and being a Vaughn fan, it only makes me look forward to the film that much more. Vaughn was seen last in The Dilemma earlier this year, which wasn’t especially well received, so hopefully Lay The Favorite will be one of many upcoming films to better show off the actor’s talents.
The film has also cast Rebecca Hall in the lead role, which sounds perfect to me. I thought she was brilliant in Ben Affleck-directed The Town last year, and she was great in Frost/Nixon back in 2008, so I can’t wait to see her in a lead role like this. Bruce Willis always seems to add his own blend of magic to any film he’s in, and Justin Timberlake has really shown in the past few years that he’s got a lot of acting talent to offer. More news as and when we get it.
