Leonardo DiCaprio is still unconfirmed for Damien Chazelle’s Evel Knievel biopic, but The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody is also reportedly in negotiations to co-star.
Following the dismal box office performance of 2023’s Babylon, director Damien Chazelle publicly wondered if he might be in ‘director’s jail’, despite making an absorbing film about the golden age of Hollywood. Whichever way you look at it, though, Babylon was a sizeable commercial failure for Paramount, and Chazelle duly set about writing a much more modestly-costed follow-up project, set in a prison.
Somewhere along the way, though, another project bubbled up when Leonardo DiCaprio showed some interest in it. and Chazelle suddenly found himself looking at a greenlight for another high-budget project: a biopic of American daredevil, Evel Knievel. DiCaprio reportedly entered negotiations, Paramount are said to have fast-tracked things and reports suggested that the whole thing could go before cameras this summer.
Knievel was famed for his daredevil stunt-riding, and staging those kinds of sequences where DiCaprio is atop a motorbike jumping dozens of buses surely won’t be cheap. Neither will the Oscar-winning actor’s salary, but according to a fresh report from The Hollywood Reporter, that hasn’t stopped Paramount from further loosening the purse strings and approving the casting of another Oscar-winning actor: Adrien Brody.
Podcast: Babylon (2022) and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021)
Brody is currently looking at roles from the rather lofty position of being a two-time Oscar winner, and would have his pick of projects, you’d imagine. According to the report, Brody is set to play Shelly Saltman, the author and sports promoter who was viciously attacked by Knievel with an aluminium bat.
With neither actor said to be signed and a summer shoot planned, it’s clear that plenty could yet change before cameras roll, but the film sounds like a pretty exciting prospect at the moment – not least because it also has a script by William Monahan, who penned Martin Scorsese and DiCaprio’s Oscar-winning crime film, The Departed.
Evel Knievel was a professional daredevil who completed some of the craziest stunts of modern times. He started out in 1965 by jumping his motorbike over two rattlesnakes and a mountain lion before moving onto increasingly long lines of cars and trucks. His final jump was in 1977 and consisted of a 90-foot motorcycle leap over a tank of 13 sharks. Don’t try that at home, we’d suggest. Unless you have a particularly large living room.
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
