Hall, Knightley, Seyfried, Lively, Cornish, Williams, Johansson, and Portman Under Consideration to Play Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY

As we previously reported, director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) is looking to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Luhrmann recently workshopped the drama with Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, and Rebecca Hall (The Town) as Daisy.  Deadline is now reporting that while Luhrmann is considering Hall for the part, he also has other actresses he’s considering.  Luhrmann is reportedly looking at Keira Knightley, Amanda Seyfried, Blake Lively, Abbie Cornish, Michelle Williams, Scarlett Johansson, and Natalie Portman.  Along with Hall, Seyfried and Portman have been mentioned before, but the other actresses are new to the list.

Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s just a list at this point.  Some of these actresses may not be able to even come in and read the script that Luhrmann wrote with Craig Pearce (who co-wrote Moulin Rouge! with Luhrmann).  However, this is a list of talented leading ladies and if coupled with DiCaprio and Maguire, Luhrmann is going to have a lot of star-power for this adaptation.  Hit the jump for a synopsis of The Great Gatsby.

Here’s a synopsis for The Great Gatsby via Amazon:

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write “something new–something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.” That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald’s finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning–” Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It’s also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means–and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. “Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel’s more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy’s patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

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