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I don’t know what’s gotten into Matthew McConaughey lately, but here’s hoping it sticks around a while. 2012 is shaping up to be the single best year of his career, with Richard Linklater’s Bernie, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, and Lee Daniel’s The Paperboy all in theaters. His 2013′s not looking so shabby from here either. McConaughey has just signed on to join Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on Jordan Belfort‘s memoir about living it up as a broker in the ’80s. More details after the jump.
Scripted by Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), The Wolf of Wall Street chronicles Belfort’s dramatic up-and-down journey through the world of finance. McConaughey will play Mark Hanna, an early boss and mentor to DiCaprio’s Belfort. Here’s a description of Belfort’s autobiography:
Jordan Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest chop shop brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities business for life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud and money-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. It covers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of how he worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire large amounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up the price and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits while public investors usually lost. Profits were laundered through purchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks. There is only brief mention of Belfort’s life before Wall Street or events since 1997. The book’s main topic is the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it’s hard to know how much to believe.
To no one’s surprise, Scorsese’s collected an impressively talented cast for his latest endeavor. Jonah Hill, Jean Dujardin, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Margot Robbie, and Jon Favreau will appear alongside DiCaprio and McConaughey. No release date has been announced for The Wolf of Wall Street, but with shooting scheduled to get underway this month in New York it’s safe to assume we’ll see the movie sometime next year.
McConaughey’s other upcoming roles include the HBO miniseries True Detectives with Cary Fukunaga and the AIDS drama The Dallas Buyers Club. He also stars in Jeff Nichols’ Mud, which hit Cannes earlier this year but has yet to set a U.S. release date.
