Jake Gyllenhaal may not have received an Oscar nomination for “Nightcrawler” on Thursday but he could still end the day with a win, as David Ayer is courting his “End of Watch” star to replace Tom Hardy as Rick Flagg in “Suicide Squad,” multiple individuals familiar with the comic book project have told TheWrap.
Warner Bros. had no comment, while a representative for Gyllenhaal didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hardy was forced to exit the project because Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “The Revenant” is going over schedule into mid-March, after which Hardy will be needed to promote WB’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which comes out on May 15. “Suicide Squad” is expected to start production in April, and that time crunch is why Hardy had to drop out of the film.
Variety‘s awards season events continue to grow with the “Actors on Actors” conversations set to be shown on PBS SoCal. The interview show features one-on-one conversations between actors and actresses including Benedict Cumberbatch, Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Jessica Chastain in discussion with one another about their craft and films.
We’ve been covering the tale of David O. Russell’s aborted “Nailed” for years, but the film is one that doesn’t seem to know when to say die. To make a long story short, Russell’s comedy — starring Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener, Tracy Morgan and James Marsden — follows an uninsured waitress (Biel) who accidentally gets shot in the head with a nail. She goes to Washington on a crusade to fight for the rights of the bizarrely injured, but gets taken advantage of by a slimy congressman (Gyllenhaal). A great premise for sure, however a string of financial bungling plagued the movie throughout production, and filming eventually halted entirely before the crucial injury sequence could be reshot. The movie changed hands, Russell walked away from it, but Voltage Pictures seems to have figured out a way to get it out there, and “Nailed” is headed for a UK release.
