With a dance card already including a Wolf Man adaptation, a stuntman drama and an astronaut drama, Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling is returning to the world of crime noire as he has signed on to star in Duke Johnson’s The Actor, according to Deadline.
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The film, co-written by Johnson and Stephen Cooney, centers on New York actor Paul Cole who is beaten and left for dead in 1950s Ohio and is stripped of his memory and stranded in a mysterious small town. As he struggles to get back home and piece together the life and identity he’s lost, the story will touch up on themes of finding love, home and one’s self. The story is an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s hard boiled novel Memory, which was written in the 1960s but was published in 2010, two years after the three-time Edgar Award winner had passed.
Click here to purchase Westlake’s original 2010 novel!
The Actor will be produced by Gosling alongside Waypoint Entertainment’s Ken Kao, Johnson (Anomalisa) and his Innerlight Films partner Abigail Spencer and Paul Young via his Make Good Content production banner. Kao and Gosling are also currently working together for the Lord-Miller-helmed adaptation of Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel Project Hail Mary at MGM and the Wolf Man reboot for Universal, which is being helmed by Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) on a story from Gosling and the Australian filmmaker.
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The Nice Guys star is currently prepping to begin production on the Russo Brothers’ (Avengers: Endgame) spy thriller The Gray Man for Netflix, in which he will face off against Chris Evans (Knives Out).
(Photo Credit: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
