Proving that his dramatic turn in last year’s Moneyball (and subsequent Oscar nomination) wasn’t simply a one-off, Jonah Hill is looking to next work with legendary director Martin Scorsese. Deadline reports that Hill will star opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Scorsese’s adaptation of Jordan Belfort‘s memoir The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio stars as Belfort, 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.
Hill will play Belfort’s close friend who becomes Belfort's business partner once he convinces Hill's character to join him in the world of stocks. Hill is also set to star opposite James Franco in the drama True Story, and his addition to The Wolf of Wall Street only affirms the fact that he plans on continuing with more dramatic roles. Nevertheless, he’s not leaving comedy completely behind. He’s set to star in Seth Rogen’s directorial debut The Apocalypse and he’ll next be seen alongside Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn in the sci-fi comedy The Watch. Production on The Wolf of Wall Street begins in August. Hit the jump for a synopsis of the book.
Here’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…