Oscar Isaac will star in Paul Schrader’s next movie

With the excep­tion of his brief appear­ance in 2018’s Anni­hi­la­tion, Oscar Isaac is long over­due for a good role. While he felt like the most excit­ing movie star around the mid­dle of the decade, he’s made a hand­ful of bad bets and hasn’t had much non-Star Wars work to be tru­ly proud of over the past few years. But that could change in the near future.

Today, Vari­ety has the scoop that Oscar Isaac will head­line The Card Counter, a promis­ing-sound­ing dra­ma about pok­er, regret, and revenge. And the rea­son that it stands to be Oscar Isaac’s big come­back is because the oth­er attached tal­ent hap­pens to be Paul Schrad­er, who’s far from a sure thing (ever seen Dying of the Light?) but a seri­ous tal­ent nonetheless.

Isaac will por­tray the pecu­liar­ly-named William Tell, a vet­er­an and gam­bling addict liv­ing a ​“spar­tan exis­tence” as he bounces from one casi­no to the next. His life gets shak­en up when he encoun­ters the young Cirk (still to be cast), a volatile young man on the warpath of vengeance against a mil­i­tary colonel who’s wronged them both.

They attempt to keep one anoth­er under con­trol as they win the funds for their joint mis­sion at the felt table, though both men run the risk of falling apart at any time. It sounds like a clas­sic Schrad­er joint in the vein of Auto Focus or Dog Eat Dog, two movies also about a pair of unsa­vory men form­ing an uneasy alliance due to a com­mon ground.

Every­thing else is still in the embry­on­ic stages, with no addi­tion­al cast­ing and a hope­ful dis­tri­b­u­tion deal when the rights go up for sale at the Amer­i­can Film Mar­ket indus­try con­fer­ence next week. But the fall fes­ti­val cir­cuit of 2020 may have just found one of its major titles.