Academy Award winner Adrien Brody has been replaced in an upcoming gangster movie that he was set to star in alongside Vince Vaughn.
Who is replacing Adrien Brody in The Bookie & the Bruiser?
According to a recent announcement from Anton, Theo James will be joining The Bookie & the Bruiser to star alongside Vaughn. While Anton didn’t specifically mention Brody, reports on the film’s early development last year noted that Brody was originally tapped to star in the film.
It’s unclear why Brody was replaced in the movie. The star just recently took home a Best Actor Oscar for his work in the 2024 film The Brutalist. Now, James will step into the role, and will play Rivner, a Jewish man who partners up with an Italian American (Vaughn) as a bookmaker and his enforcer to run in an illegal gambling ring.
James most recently starred in Neon‘s 2024 film The Monkey, as well as HBO’s The White Lotus, and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.
The Bookie & the Bruiser is written and directed by S. Craig Zahler, his first feature film since 2018’s Dragged Across Concrete. Anthony Katagas, the Oscar-winning producer for 12 Years a Slave, will produce through Keep Your Head Productions alongside Dave Caplan.
“Set in 1959 New York, ‘The Bookie & the Bruiser’ follows a pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivner and an oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side, both of whom served overseas during WWII and returned changed men who no longer fit inside the lives they’d left behind,” reads the film’s official synopsis.
“Uninterested in taking orders from bosses or playing by the rules of polite society, the two friends partner up as a bookmaker and an enforcer and create an illicit gambling operation that proves to be very profitable, though risky, and their situation gets rather sticky when they find themselves stuck between a powerful Irish gang and the Mafia.”