Leonardo DiCaprio set to play the ‘Italian… | Little White Lies

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Leonar­do DiCaprio set to play the Ital­ian Sher­lock Holmes’

02 Feb 2017

Words by Dan Einav

A man wearing a fedora hat and a tan overcoat standing in a dimly lit alley.
A man wearing a fedora hat and a tan overcoat standing in a dimly lit alley.
The actor will also serve as pro­duc­er on an adap­ta­tion of the Mafia thriller The Black Hand’.

Leonar­do DiCaprio is set to star in and pro­duce a Mafia thriller based on Stephen Talty’s best­selling non­fic­tion noir” The Black Hand’. The actor will like­ly play Joe Pet­rosi­no, an NYPD police offi­cer dubbed The Ital­ian Sher­lock Holmes” who went after mem­bers of tit­u­lar gang around the turn of the 20th century.

Viewed today as a pro­to-Mafia organ­i­sa­tion, The Black Hand came to Amer­i­ca from Italy and set about ter­ror­is­ing New York­ers by kid­nap­ping civil­ians and extort­ing mon­ey from their hostages’ fam­i­lies. Pet­rosi­no, who was assas­si­nat­ed by the group in 1909, worked tire­less­ly to quash the gang, not only out of duty to pro­tect the city from such mer­ci­less crim­i­nals, but to pre­serve the integri­ty and pub­lic image of Ital­ian immigrants.

It’s a role that sounds tai­lor-made for DiCaprio, giv­en that he’s pre­vi­ous­ly played a peri­od detec­tive in Shut­ter Island, as well as a cop who infil­trates a gang in The Depart­ed. This also isn’t the first text by Tal­ty to receive the big screen treat­ment, with the author hav­ing report­ed­ly ghost-writ­ten A Captain’s Duty’ which formed the basis of Paul Green­grass’ mar­itime thriller Cap­tain Phillips.

The project is still very much in the ear­ly stages of devel­op­ment, with Dead­line report­ing that DiCaprio and the rest of the film’s pro­duc­ers are still look­ing for a screen­writer to adapt Talty’s text. There’s no direc­tor attached either, but giv­en that DiCaprio is star­ring, it’s set in New York and fea­tures Ital­ian-Amer­i­can gang­sters, we would love to see Mar­tin Scors­ese take a punt on it.

DiCaprio is cur­rent­ly on hia­tus from act­ing fol­low­ing the gru­elling expe­ri­ence of shoot­ing The Revenant, but in addi­tion to The Black Hand he’s also rumoured to be inter­est­ed in the lead in a biopic about Sam Philips, the leg­endary music pro­duc­er who ignit­ed the careers of the likes of Elvis, John­ny Cash and Howl­in’ Wolf in the 1950s.

Who would you like to see helm The Black Hand? Have your say @LWLies

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