Tye Sheridan, perhaps best known for starring in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, has joined Ben Affleck to star in The Tender Bar, which George Clooney is directing for Amazon.
Tender Bar adapts the memoir of the same name by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and film subject J.R. Moehringer, who will also serve as an executive producer on the film.
The memoir recounts Moehringer’s adolescent years, as he grows up on Long Island in search of a father figure among the patrons at his uncle’s bar.
Sources say Sheridan will play Moehringer in the drama while Affleck is playing the uncle. William Monahan wrote the screenplay.
Clooney and Grant Heslov are producing via Smokehosue Pictures along with Ted Hope, who is operating under his first-look deal with Amazon.
In addition to toppling Ready Player One, which adapted the best-selling sci-fi novel by Ernie Cline, Sheridan played Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, in the recent X-Men movies. In the can, the actor has a starring turn in The Night Clerk, a thriller with Ana De Armas which he also produced, and is also starring in Neil Berger’s sci-fi film Voyagers.
Off screen, the actor is a co-founder of Wonder Dynamics, a media-tech startup whose focus is utilizing Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to develop production tools that would allow indie filmmakers to work with tentpole-level VFX on a fraction of the budget.
Sheridan is repped by WME, Mosaic and Genow Schenkman.
