Rather than go the route of most successful foreign actors and take on a villain role, Best Actor Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin (The Artist) will join another Oscar-winner's film.  According to Variety, Dujardin is in talks to join Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street.  The story follows Belfort (DiCaprio), a hard partying, drug addicted stockbroker who was indicted in 1998 for security fraud and money laundering, and served a 22-month federal prison stretch.  Dujardin will play "Jean-Jacques Handali, a suave Swiss banker involved in laundering illicit funds for Belfort's firm."  Okay, so he's kind of a villain.  The film also stars Jonah Hill as Belfort's friend and business partner, and Kyle Chandler as the FBI agent who took down Belfort.Filming on The Wolf of Wall Street is set to begin in August.  Hit the jump for a synopsis of the book.  Dujardin will next be seen in the comedy The Players and he's set to co-star with Tim Roth in the spy thriller Mobius.the_wolf_of_wall_street_jordan_belfort_book_coverHere’s the synopsis for Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street:

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.

Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.

From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…