As with any event tracking major, world-wide attention, Hollywood is hungry to cash in. So it comes with no surprise that even after Warner Bros. and Paramount are working on separate biopics on Lance Armstrong, news of another has come in today. According to Deadline, Stephen Frears is mounting his own take with Working Title and he’s already found his leading man.
The trade reports that Ben Foster is in final talks to take on the role of Armstrong, with a script coming from John Hodge (Trainspotting, Trance). Set to track the career of the cyclist, the story will include his bout with testicular cancer, as well the doping charges that banned him from the sport for life. Things are also moving fast, with hope to get production going by this fall, after Foster will be seen in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, around the time his other Sundance hit Kill Your Darlings arrives, and before Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor makes its way into theaters.
Alex Gibney, however, will be out the gate earlier with his documentary The Armstrong Lie, which will be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics later this year. As we await more news on all the above Armstrong projects, check out the first look of Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in Frears’ Toronto-bound drama Philomena, tracking the true story of an unmarried Irish-Catholic woman who, decades after being forced by her community to give up her newborn son, embarks on a search to find him with the aid of a BBC reporter.
What do you think of Foster in the role?