Two-time Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain is set to star in the lead role of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming film based on the poker 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.
The one thing I love about playing poker is it cuts the class system to shreds. One minute you are playing against a steelworker from Port Talbot, the next you are sitting next to a world class actor from Hollywood.
The poker table is a magnet for Hollywood actors and actresses. Some like the action, others need the table time to prepare for upcoming roles. One such actress who may need to get some table time under her fingernails is the star of Interstellar, The Martian and Zero Dark Thirty: Jessica Chastain.
According to The Wrap, acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has offered the two-time Academy Award nominee the leading role in his film adaptation of the memoir with the longest title in the world: Molly’s Game: From Hollywood’s Elite to Wall Street’s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker.
If Chastain accepts Sorkin’s offer, she will play the role of Molly Bloom, the former ski champ who achieved notoriety as the host of a High Stakes underground poker game featuring the likes of Ben Affleck, Leonard DiCaprio, and Tobey Maguire. The feds ended her fun in 2013.
If Sorkin is going to get his leading lady he had better hope her assistant can squeeze more into her Google Calendar than most. Chastain is fast becoming one of the busiest women in Hollywood. She has starring roles in the upcoming Xavier Dolan flick The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, The Huntsman Winter’s War and The Zookeeper’s Wife. She is currently in Canada filming the controversial gun control thriller Miss Sloane and is soon to start her production company: Freckle Films.
Sorkin, who was strangely snubbed by 2016 Oscar’s for his work on the Steve Jobs biopic, also wrote the script for the movie, and will team up with Mark Gordon and Amy Pascal for his directorial debut. Gordon and Pascal will produce the film. Gordon worked with Sorkin on Steve Jobs. Pascal is a former senior executive at Sony Pictures Entertainment.
