When a foreign director breaks into Hollywood, he or she will often bring along the actor that led their acclaimed international film. We recently saw it with the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo duo of Niels Arden Oplev and Noomi Rapace with Dead Man Down, as well as the Bullhead team of Michaël R. Roskam and Matthias Schoenaerts with their currently shooting Animal Rescue, which also stars Tom Hardy and Rapace.
Now, as the two latter stars prep for another project together, its director is reteaming with one of his close collaborators. According to THR, Joel Kinnaman is looking to get back into business with his Safe House and Snabba Cash helmer Daniel Espinosa for Child 44, a Soviet-era, 1950s-set thriller.
Ridley Scott, who directed Rapace in Prometheus, is set to produce the project, which follows Hardy as a Soviet police officer, whose wife (Rapace) has some hidden secrets, as he is tasked with investigating a string of child murders. Kinnaman’s role is described as an “ambitious and murderous nemesis” of Hardy’s character.
With a script from Richard Price, who has previously worked on The Wire, we also recently got word that the project will be made by Worldview Entertainment and Summit Entertainment. As we await more casting 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 Kinnaman back with Espinosa?