Harsh Vardhan
The Garden State will be transformed into 1950s New York for a thriller next year! The filming of ‘The Bookie & the Bruiser,’ starring Vince Vaughn and Adrien Brody, will start in New Jersey in early 2025. Previous reports confirmed that writer-director S. Craig Zahler is helming the project based on his own screenplay.
Set in 1959 New York, the film tells the story of two World War II veterans named Rivner, a thoughtful Jewish man, and Boscolo, a large Italian-American, both hailing from the Lower East Side. The war leaves them profoundly altered, unable to reintegrate into their previous lives. Rejecting conventional employment and societal expectations, they form a partnership as a bookmaker and an enforcer, launching a highly profitable but dangerous gambling business. Their operation becomes increasingly complex and hazardous when they find themselves entangled with a powerful Irish gang and the Mafia, creating a volatile and treacherous situation.
The film marks the third collaboration between Zahler and Vaughn, following their work on ‘Dragged Across Concrete‘ and ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99.‘ In ‘Dragged Across Concrete,’ Vaughn portrayed Anthony Lurasetti, a suspended cop who, along with his partner, delves into the criminal underworld for compensation. In ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99,’ the actor played Bradley Thomas, a former boxer-turned-drug runner who ends up in a prison battleground after a drug deal goes wrong. Zahler also directed ‘Bone Tomahawk,’ a Western about an aging sheriff and his posse who venture into dangerous territory to rescue their town’s doctor from cannibalistic cave dwellers.
Brody recently appeared as Schubert Green in Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City,’ which follows a writer crafting a renowned fictional play about a grieving father who, along with his tech-obsessed family, travels to the rural Asteroid City for a junior stargazing competition, only to have his perspective altered forever. The actor played Chad Luxt in Charlie Day’s comedy ‘Fool’s Paradise,’ in which a hapless lover becomes an accidental celebrity who subsequently loses everything. Brody’s other recent projects include ‘Ghosted,’ ‘Manodrome,’ and ‘Blonde.’
New Jersey has recently served as the filming location for projects such as ‘Joker: Folie à Deux‘ and ‘It Ends with Us.’
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