Jean Dujardin, a best-actor nominee for his role in "The Artist," has signed with WME.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty ImagesAcademy Award-winner Jean Dujardin is in talks to join Martin Scorsese‘s financial thriller The Wolf of Wall Street, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The Red Granite project, an adaptation of Jordan Belfort‘s novel of the same name, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Kyle Chandler.
Dujardin, who picked up a best actor Oscar for last year’s The Artist, will play money-laundering Swiss banker Jean-Jacques Handali.
DiCaprio is playing Belfort, a Long Island penny stock broker who served 20 months in prison for participating in a massive 1990s securities fraud that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including mob infiltration. Belfort — who owned a yacht that sank off the coast of Sardinia and who became an alcoholic and drug addict — served as an inspiration for Ben Younger‘s 2000 movie Boiler Room.
Hill is set to play Danny Porush, who is convinced by his future best friend and business partner Belfort to quit his job in furniture sales and enter the lucrative yet volatile world of stock brokering. The film chronicles the duo’s meteoric rise and colossal fall amid scandal, fraud and excess.
DiCaprio and Scorsese are producing with Red Granite’s Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland, as well as Emma Koskoff of Sikelia Productions and Alexandra Milchan of EMJAG Productions. Red Granite is financing the picture.
Production is slated to begin in August in New York.
Dujardin is represented by WME.
Email: Daniel.Miller@THR.com
Twitter: @DanielNMiller
