The uber talented Rooney Mara is set to star with Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett in AITH fav and Oscar Winner Guillermo del Toro’s next genre opus NIGHTMARE ALLEY. He’s making the film for Fox Searchlight under the deal he made at the studio after they collaborated on the Oscar winner.
The film is based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 book of the same name while the script is written by Del Toro and Kim Morgan . Here's the book's synopsis:
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.
And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.
Cooper plays Stan while Mara will take on Molly who is the closest thing to Stan’s true love. It is to note that there was another adaptation of NIGHTMARE ALLEY filmed in 1947 by Edmund Goulding. Poster below!