Dev Patel to play the founder of Chippendales

By Sam Barsanti | July 18, 2017 | 7:45pm

Aux Features Film

Way back in 2014, when Donald Trump just said racist stuff about the president on Twitter instead of actually being the president on Twitter, we reported that Ben Stiller was going to appear in a biopic about the rise and fall of Indian immigrant Somen Banerjee and Chippendales, the wildly popular all-male stripper revue he started. Stiller was set to play Nick DeNoia, Banerjee’s business partner and—spoiler alert—eventual murder victim, and now, finally, the project is moving forward.

According to Deadline, Dev Patel is in talks to play Banerjee, and writer Isaac Adamson (who wrote that movie about Bubbles the chimp) is taking a new pass at the script. Stiller is also still attached to Chippendales (which seems to be the working title), so we’ll finally get to see him in the movie that Deadline refers to as “Magic Mike meets Scarface.”