EXCLUSIVE: Remember how a movie actor’s stock dropped when they slummed on the small screen? Matthew McConaughey heads into the weekend as a favorite to win an Emmy for HBO’s True Detective. His performance as Rust Cohle, stacked on top of his Oscar winning Dallas Buyers Club role, is so impressive he is being chased for numerous plum film roles. I’m told that Warner Bros covets him to play the role of Randall Flagg in The Stand, the adaptation of Stephen King’s apocalyptic masterpiece novel that Josh Boone will direct. Flagg is the personification of evil, a demonic figure who wreaks havoc after a plague kills most of the population. He was played in haunting fashion by Jamie Sheridan in the miniseries adaptation. This is by no means a firm situation, but it’s understandable why the studio thinks McConaughey would be a compelling and persuasive force of evil in the film. Flagg was such a force of evil that King used him in several of his works including The Stand.
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At the same time, I’m hearing that McConaughey and Oscar-winning Traffic scribe-turned-director Stephen Gaghan might team up for Gold, a Black Bear Pictures film that has a script by Patrick Massett & John Zinman that is based on a true story about the 1993 Bre-X Mineral Corporation mining scandal in which vast amounts of gold were reportedly discovered in the Indonesian jungle. Black Bear’s Teddy Schwarzman will produce alongside Paul Haggis and Michael Nozik under their Hwy61 production banner, and Massett and Zinman. CAA is packaging the project.