Adrien Brody is currently operating in one of his periodic halos of undeniable Oscar success, having recently claimed his second Best Actor Oscar for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, and the cinematic carte blanche that comes along with it. With the basic understanding that he can make pretty much anything he wants for his next two or three movies, Brody is apparently gearing up to… make a movie about jumpsuited stunt performer Evel Knievel. Which is the sort of thing we’d associate more with “12-year-old boy asked about their dream job” than “recent Oscar winner selecting next role,” but, then, we aren’t the ones with the paired hood ornaments, are we?
This is per Deadline, reporting that Brody is apparently circling a part in Damien Chazelle’s upcoming film Evel Knievel On Tour, a project that apparently started as a passion project from Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio (who originally brought the idea to Chazelle) is reportedly in negotiations to play the famous bus-jumper himself; it’s not clear if Brody is also aiming for the role, or if he’d play some sort of Knievel-adjacent figure, possibly one of those people who presumably told Knievel that there’s a limit to how many transit vehicles one body can surpass, only to be persistently proven wrong.
Chazelle, for his part, desperately needs a win, of the kind Brody has proved he can deliver: He hasn’t made a movie since 2022 flop Babylon, an ode to classic Hollywood that modern America treated like it was basically radioactive. He’d previously been courting DiCaprio for some kind of prison flick before the star pointed him toward the Knievel movie, which reportedly won’t be a straight biopic of the stunt performer, but something more focused. The current logic, presumably, is that if Chazelle can stuff his movie with enough Best Actor winners, people have got to like it; he’ll have to move fast, though, because Brody’s dance card was already filling up fast off of The Brutalist‘s reputation even before he won on Oscar night.
