Their first collaboration hasn’t even starting shooting, but it looks like rapidly rising stars Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace are becoming close friends. The duo recently confirmed their involvement in the next film from Bullhead director Michael R. Roskam, Animal Rescue, but that won’t be the last time they’ll appear together. Based on Dennis Lehane‘s short story — once set in Boston, now transplanted to New York — the crime drama will begin production this March and now their next project will see them team once again.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Hardy and Rapace are coming back together for the Soviet-era, 1950s-set thriller Child 44. Ridley Scott, who directed Rapace in Prometheus, is set to produce the project, while Safe House and Easy Money director Daniel Espinosa will take the helm. The film will follow Hardy as a Soviet police officer, whose wife (Rapace) has some hidden secrets, as he is tasked with investigating a string of child murders.
With a script from Richard Price, who has previously worked on The Wire, this one is shaping up to be a taut thriller, with a bit of a dream cast. As we await more information ahead of its May production start, check out the synopsis of Tom Rob Smith‘s novel below thanks to Amazon:
Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, this stellar debut from British author Smith offers appealing characters, a strong plot and authentic period detail. When war hero Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a rising star in the MGB, the State Security force, is assigned to look into the death of a child, Leo is annoyed, first because this takes him away from a more important case, but, more importantly, because the parents insist the child was murdered. In Stalinist Russia, there’s no such thing as murder; the only criminals are those who are enemies of the state. After attempting to curb the violent excesses of his second-in-command, Leo is forced to investigate his own wife, the beautiful Raisa, who’s suspected of being an Anglo-American sympathizer. Demoted and exiled from Moscow, Leo stumbles onto more evidence of the child killer. The evocation of the deadly cloud-cuckoo-land of Russia during Stalin’s final days will remind many of Gorky Park and Darkness at Noon, but the novel remains Smith’s alone, completely original and absolutely satisfying.
Are you looking forward to seeing Hardy and Rapace together (again)?