He'll be back as crafty, aside-happy politician Frank Underwood in the new season of House Of Cards, but Kevin Spacey has just agreed to play someone a little more inspiring – and real, to boot. He'll star with Nicholas Hoult in Rebel In The Rye.
Adapted by The Butler writer Danny Strong from Kenneth Slawenski's biography JD Salinger: A Life, it'll see Hoult as the Catcher In The Rye author in his formative days. The film, which Strong is using as his feature directing debut, aims to chronicle the life and mind of the secretive writer, including how he brought the iconic tome from the depths of his brain. It’ll look at his youth, his time spent in conflict during World War II, finding love, enduring loss and years of rejection letters from The New Yorker, which fuelled chronic writer’s block but also helped him find his voice.
Spacey is playing Whit Burnett, a professor at Columbia in New York and the editor of a magazine called Story who takes the young Salinger under his wing and helps him grow as a writer. The movie is lucky to have secured his services, since Spacey and his Trigger Street production company partner Dana Brunetti are about to take over running film company Relativity Media, and he'll have less time available to spend time in front of the camera. But he is still working, and is currently on the set of _Billionaire Boys Clu_b. He'll also be seen opposite Michael Shannon in Elvis & Nixon, due here on April 29.