It looks like a project first announced way back at the end of the last year is bubbling back to life.
Deadline reports that Bruce Willis and Rebecca Hall are the frontrunners to join Stephen Frears‘ adaptation of the Beth Raymer gambling memoir “Lay The Favorite.” D.V. DeVincentis (“High Fidelity,” “Grosse Pointe Blank“) adapted the story that will follow a woman in her 30s who becomes involved with a group of fiftysomething math geeks in Queens who have worked out a way to rig the sports books in Vegas. No word yet on what roles Willis or Hall are eyeing, but the idea of John McClane playing a math geek is utterly hilarious/fantastic. At the time, the project was described as a mix of “High Fidelity” and “The Grifters,” which sounds potentially very awesome.
However, both Willis and Hall aren’t locked in just yet. Willis was most recently linked to Wes Anderson‘s “Moon Rise Kingdom,” while Hall has been reading for Baz Luhrmann‘s “The Great Gatsby” (though he seems to be meeting with every actress possible before making a decision).
The material sounds great, we’re big fans of Rebecca Hall (go rent “Please Give” if you missed it earlier this year) and we hope the signs of life around the casting mean the project is moving forward. It will hopefully put Frears back into some interesting territory after his thoroughly pedestrian provincial comedy “Tamara Drewe.”
