Leo, Jonah have ‘American Nightmare’
Wolf of Wall Street stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are set to reunite in American Nightmare – a film about a man wrongly accused of a terrorist act during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
After playing corrupt market traders for Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated film, the duo plan to take on leading roles in American Nightmare, based on an investigative piece written for Vanity Fair magazine.
Hill is expected to take the lead role in the film, stepping into the shoes of Richard Jewell, a security guard who discovered a backpack containing three bombs shortly before a concert ahead of the 1996 Olympics.
Jewell’s discovery meant that much of the crowded Centennial Olympic Park could be evacuated, limiting the bombs’ impact to two deaths and 111 injured.
However, after initially being praised by news organisations covering the event as a hero, Jewell was lately falsely identified as the main suspect by the FBI, and was accused of having planted the bombs himself in order to profit from discovering it before the explosion.
Leonardo DiCaprio – who is producing the film through his company Appian Way – will play Jewell’s attorney Lin Wood, who eventually cleared his client’s name.
It was later discovered that the bombing was engineered by Eric Robert Rudolph – who was eventually convicted of four bombings in protest against abortion and gay rights and is now serving four life sentences.
Hill will work on American Nightmare in parallel to another Appian Way project, a TV series centered around the late-1980s hip hop scene featuring A Tribe Called Quest’s Kamaal Fareed, also known as Q-Tip.
