Jonah Hill Joins Leonardo DiCaprio in WOLF OF WALL STREET
It looks like Jonah Hill is expanding his range from comedy into drama. The first real dramatic role we saw him in was Moneyball, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Now he's been cast alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's new project Wolf of Wall Street.
The film is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort, who will be played by Dicaprio "a Long Island penny stock broker who served 20 months in prison for participating in a massive 1990s securities fraud that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including mob infiltration. Belfort, who lived large, owned a yacht that sank off the coast of Sardinia, and became an alcoholic and drug addict, served as an inspiration for Ben Younger's 2000 movie The Boiler Room. Hill is set to play Danny Porush, who is convinced by his future best friend and business partner Belfort to quit his job in furniture sales and enter the lucrative yet volatile world of stock brokering. The film chronicles the duo’s meteoric rise and colossal fall amidst scandal, fraud, and excess."
I've enjoyed most of Hill's films. He's done some great comedies, and I especially enjoyed him in 21 Jump Street. I thought he was ok in Moneyball, but landing a role a Martin Scorsese film is pretty big time for any actor. Hill is obviously on his way to becoming more of a dramatic actor. What do you think of that?
Here's the detailed description of the book:
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.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.
From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…