Willem Defoe Joins Guillermo del Toro's Psychological Horror Thriller NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Willem Dafoe is set to join Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, and Rooney Mara in director Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming film Nightmare Alley.
The movie is based on the 1946 novel which tells the story of 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.”
Dafoe will play “the head barker at a traveling carnival who gives Bradley Cooper’s character a job, ushering him into a world of show biz and grifting.” I love Dafoe, and it’s great to see him jump on board a Del Toro movie!
When previously talking about the movie, Del Toro described it as “just a straight, really dark story.” When asked if he could tease anything about the movie, the filmmaker said:
“Well what it is is that book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman before I saw the Tyrone Power movie, and I loved the book. My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily — the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have — in my short films, I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real ‘underbelly of society’ type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
When asked about the rating of the film, the filmmaker said, “Yes, big R. Like, double R!” So you can expect this thing to be full-on dark Del Toro. The movie also stars Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Povinelli.
Here’s a description of William Lindsay Gresham‘s 1946 novel:
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.
Are you excited about Del Toro’s next film project?
Source: Variety