With** The Deep Blue Good-By** landing the services of Christian Bale to star and James Mangold to direct, 20th Century Fox’s adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books is coming together at last. The next part of puzzle is finding a female lead, and it looks like Rosamund Pike will fill that role.
Bale is playing charismatic rogue McGee, a Floridian sleuth and “salvage consultant” who is always getting into deeper water than he intends with dangerous women and very bad men.
The Deep Blue Good-By represents the first of the McGee books, and with 21 tomes in MacDonald’s series so far, Fox will be hoping this one has legs so it can make more. After a somewhat torturous development process, Mangold is set in the director’s chair, working from a script that has seen input from Dennis Lehane and Scott Frank.
Pike, last seen as the complicated Amy Dunne in **Gone Girl **(which earned her an Oscar nod), has a few projects in the works. She’s already shot thriller Return To Sender and is attached to The Bends and French Window. Then there is The Mountain Between Us, which is waiting until later in the year to have the right weather conditions, so Pike will film The Deep Blue Good-By first. TV-wise, she’s the voice of Lady Penelope in the new, CG-enhanced take on Thunderbirds.