Rooney Mara Reunites With Cate Blanchett In Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Nightmare Alley’
By Hoai-Tran Bui/Sept. 8, 2019 11:00 am EST
Mara had been reported as being in talks for the role since last month, but is now confirmed to star in the film. Joining Nightmare Alley reunites her with Carol co-star Cate Blanchett, who was reportedly in talks to play Stan’s psychologist, a character that may be something of a con artist herself. Other actors set to round out the cast are Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Willem Dafoe, and Michael Shannon.
Del Toro’s film isn’t the first adaptation of Nightmare Alley. A 1947 noir directed by Edmund Goulding starred Tyrone Power and Coleen Gray, though del Toro has said that he was taken with the book before he saw the first film. Del Toro has called the film “the first chance I have to do a real ‘underbelly of society’ type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
Here’s the book’s synopsis:
And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.
No release date has yet been set for Nightmare Alley.
