Leonardo Dicaprio has a penchant for playing great, real life figures who had a profound effect on their chosen field. Whether it's con man Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can; Howard Hughes in The Aviator; or J. Edgar Hoover, Dicaprio seeks out those roles like a hawk. It's possible he'll be adding yet another to that impressive list, as Deadline reports he has the "inside track" to star in a biopic of famed English mathematician and cryptanalyst, Alan Turing.
Warner Brothers bought the spec script to Grahame Moore's The Imitation Game for a hefty seven figure sum, based mostly on Dicaprio's interest in the project. Turing is often considered the father of computer science due to his study of algorithm and computing, leading to the creation of the Turing Machine, a pre-cursor of sorts to the modern computer. The film, based on Andrew Hodges' book Alan Turing: The Enigma, will follow his life beginning as a mathematician, to his time as a codebreaker in WWII, and his criminal prosecution for being a homosexual. Turing would ultimately take his own life by eating a cyanide filled apple.
I'm getting flashes of A Beautiful Mind right now, so I guess it should come as no surprise that Deadline reports Ron Howard is circling the directing job. Nothing is set in stone just yet, so we can add this to the pile up of potential flicks Dicaprio has attached his name to. Just last week he was lined up for the assassin film, Santori. He's got The Wolf of Wall Street possibly with Martin Scorsese; a potential remake of The Gambler; Todd Field's Creed of Violence; and the JFK assassination film Legacy of Secrecy. I probably missed something, too. And let's not forget he's currently in Australia filming The Great Gatsby, and after that he'll jump right into Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.
