Like Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy is attached to pretty much every semi-interesting project on the horizon. Most recently is the previously thought-to-be-dead adaption of Matt Bondurant‘s novel The Wettest County in the World. The project was titled The Promised Land, but 24 Frames’ new report makes no mention of a title change.
The film also rumored to have Ryan Gosling and Amy Adams, but that is no more. Inception and Bronson star Tom Hardy will team up with Shia LaBeouf in the Prohibition-era dramatic thriller, written by none other than Nick Cave. He also wrote The Proposition for Hillcoat, who most recently directed The Road. Check out a synopsis of The Wettest County below.
This family saga follows the Bondurants, bootlegging brothers runnin’ stills, runnin’ loads, and runnin’ from the law in Depression-era Virginia. The book is mainly narrated through the experience of the youngest Bondurant, Jack (in truth, a grandfather of the author), and his family’s moonshine enterprise supplies the action in a plot that evokes the culture of distilling and distributing white lightning. To optimistic Jack, bootlegging is both a bond to his older brothers, Forrest and Howard, and a means to make cash to impress a girl. Forrest, by contrast, is taciturn and suspicious: the world is violent, and he meets it on that ground. Tender of the stills and imbiber from same, burly Howard is always ready to take on the Bondurants’ enemies, corrupt law officers. Wending through this conflict in flash-forward mode is novelist Sherwood Anderson, who plumbs the Bondurant story a few years after the brothers’ climactic confrontation with the county sheriff. Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life.
Shooting is set for the spring.
Are you excited Hillcoat is getting his next project off the ground with Hardy attached?