Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

‘Locke’ and ‘Hurt Locker’ talents lock up real-life post-9/11 'True American' tale

Tom Hardy, the star of ’Locke’ and the claw-masked villain in ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ will team with ‘The Hurt Locker’’s Oscar-winning director, Kathryn Bigelow, for an adaptation of ‘True American: Murder & Mercy in Texas.'

Tom Hardy gives the kind of performance in Locke, the one-man drama currently playing at the Ritz Bourse, that you can't help but take notice of. And clearly, Kathryn Bigelow --the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and the Osama bin Laden hunt pic, Zero Dark Thirty -- has. Variety announced Thursday that the English actor and the American filmmaker will team on an adaptation of Anand Giridharadas' just-published True American: Murder & Mercy In Texas. A post-9/11 horror tale, the book is about Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force officer who moved to America, planning to work in the technology field, to make a new life. But in the days after the hijacked jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, looking to avenge the Al Qaeda attacks, walked into the Dallas minimart where Bhuiyan had found temporary work, shooting him and nearly killing him. Stroman killed two other victims, at other gas stations, that same day.

Bigelow's film will traek the paths of these two very different men, and what happens to them in the aftermath of the shooting. Hardy is set to star as Stroman. No word on the casting of the Bhuiyan role.

Hardy has The Drop, a crime thriller with Noomi Rapace and the late James Gandolfini, coming in September, and Child 44, a murder story set in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, also slated for release. And he's going to delve deep into the soul of Elton John in Rocketman, a biopic of the flamboyant rock singer and songsmith.

Locke, meanwhile, is already generating Oscar buzz. Check it out.