Dylan O'Brien to Star in Peter Farrelly's THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER
Dylan O’Brien (Maze Runner) is in negotiations to star in Peter Farrelly’s upcoming film project, which is based on the Joanna Molloy and John “Chickie” Donohue novel The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A True Story of Friendship Stronger Than War.
The movie is based on the true story of Donohue, “who left New York in 1967 to track down and share a few beers with his childhood buddies in the Army … while they were fighting in Vietnam.”
Farrelly is co-writing the script for the film along with Brian Currie and Pete Jones. According to Variety, O’Brien beat out several other actors for the part, “which was one of the more sought after roles in Hollywood for a leading man in recent weeks.”
O’Brien will star alongside Green Book and Lord of the Rings actor Viggo Mortensen, who was previously cast in the film in a supporting role.
O’Brien was most recently seen in the eOne film, The Education of Fredrick Fitzell, and will appear next in two Paramount movies titled Infinite and Monster Problems.
Here’s the description from the book:
In 1967, John (Chick) Donohue was a 26-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran working as a merchant seaman when he was challenged one night in a New York City bar. The men gathered at this hearth had lost family and friends in the ongoing war in Vietnam. Now, they were seeing protesters turn on the troops. One neighborhood patriot proposed an idea many might deem preposterous: One of them should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies in combat, and give each of them messages of support from back home, maybe some laughs - and beer.
Chick volunteered for the mission. He sailed to Vietnam on a cargo ship carrying a backpack full of American beer, landing in Qui Nho'n in 1968. Things went awry when Chick got caught in the Tet Offensive, starting in the early hours as an eyewitness to the battle to retake the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where he became stuck for months.
Chick Donohue later became legendary as "the sandhog who went to Harvard." He worked for decades on behalf of New York's tunnel builders as the legislative and political director of Sandhogs Local 147.
This is the story of his epic beer run to Vietnam, in his own words and in those of the men he found in the war zone.