Leonardo DiCaprio To Star in Guillermo del Toro's NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Leonardo DiCaprio is in negotiations to star in Guillermo del Toro’s next film project Nightmare Alley. I actually kind of like the fact DiCaprio and del Toro are going to be working with each other.

This will be the first film project that del Toro will direct since The Shape of Water. It will be an adaptation of the 1946 novel about an “ambitious young con-man who hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the table on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.”

There was already a film made in 1947, but this will be a different take on the source material. The director also wrote the script with Kim Morgan and is being produced by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The plan is for him to shoot the film in the fall.

As for DiCaprio, he will next be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s next film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’ll be great to see what he and del Toro end up doing together with this movie.

Here’s a more detailed description of the story from the book:

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

What do you all think about del Toro and DiCaprio teaming up for Nightmare Alley?

Source: Variety