Fox Searchlight is in final talks with Tom Hardy to star in Animal Rescue, and is offering the female lead to Noomi Rapace. Searchlight is eyeing a March start date in New York for a film that was scripted by Gone Baby Gone author Dennis Lehane from a short story first published in the collection Boston Noir. Animal Rescue will be directed by Michael R. Roskam, whose breakout film Bullhead was a nominee for Best Foreign Language film last year. He was set earlier this fall. Chernin Entertainment is producing, Deadline reported.
The drama focuses on a man who wants to shed his criminal path but somehow gets mixed up in a bad heist and a killing resulting from a lost and contested pit bull. As he has done with all his books, Lehane set the short story in the outskirts of Boston.
