Leonardo DiCaprio to star in Damien Chazelle’s biopic of stuntman Evel Knievel
Academy Award-winner Leonardo DiCaprio has been lined up to portray legendary stuntman Evel Knievel in a biopic by Babylon director Damien Chazelle.
According to a new report by Puck, DiCaprio’s manager, Rick Yorn, is currently negotiating a deal to have him star in Chazelle’s upcoming project, which reportedly centres around Knievel’s notorious Snake River jump in 1974.
The movie, which is currently untitled, is based on a script by Terence Winter that Chazelle is revising. Puck states that the director’s current plan is for the biopic to be shot this summer, which would make it DiCaprio’s closest project to be realised.
Currently, there is no further information available regarding the biopic such as the production company involved with the project, a potential release date or casting information outside of DiCaprio as Knievel.
Last September, during an interview with Vanity Fair, Chazelle, who hasn’t made a movie since Babylon in 2022, provided an update on his plans to get back in the director’s chair. He shared: “My mind is all still figuring itself out in terms of what’s next. I’ve definitely been working on this thing that I might be jumping into—but there’s another thing I might be jumping into.”
Chazelle continued: “There’s two things that I’m toying with, so I need to commit to one lane or the other fast.”
On February 20th, it was revealed that DiCaprio had teamed up with Martin Scorsese, Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt for an untitled mafia film based on a true story. It’s set to star Johnson as a crime boss in Hawaii as he attempts to gain control of the dark underworld across the Hawaiian islands during the 1960s and ’70s.
Nick Bilton, who has previously written books on Twitter and Silk Road, is set to pen the movie. Meanwhile, Scorsese, Johnson, Blunt, DiCaprio, Bilton, Dany Garcia, Lisa Frechette, and Rick Yorn will serve as producers on the project.
Although no production company is currently attached to the project, multiple bids are reportedly either already on the table or set to arrive soon from the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros.
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