Aaron Sorkin told the crowd at CinemaCon he’s ready to tell the story behind the headlines in Molly’s Game.
“It isn’t often you come across a story that is both cool and has a lot of heart, and this one does,” Sorkin said after the first trailer for his directorial debut screened.
The film stars Jessica Chastain as Molly Bloom, a skier who, after her Olympic dreams are dashed, heads to Los Angeles and becomes a cocktail waitress and eventually rises through the social circuit to became an organizer of underground poker games for the Hollywood elite. But when a Russian mob connection surfaces, the FBI moves in.
The trailer was familiar in tone to Sorkin big-screen projects like The Social Network or Steve Jobs, with just a small dash of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street thrown in.
“I like that the film explores female power and what that means in society,” Chastain said. “Molly’s journey goes through that, and Aaron really showed the hurtles she had, but also how powerful a person she is.”
She also said Sorkin acted out every part of the script in his office.
“I said to him, ‘I’m never going to be as good a Molly as you are,’ ” Chastain said.
“It’s the truth,” Sorkin joked, saying Chastain is great, but “you will never get to see my Molly … perhaps one day in dinner theater.”
STX’s Molly’s Game is based on Bloom’s memoir Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker. It also stars Idris Elba, Michael Cera and Kevin Costner.
