Film - Molly's Game

Steve Taylor-Bryant gets a royal flush with news about the upcoming film Molly's Game...

It's not often news breaks about a potential film or television show and I get really excited. I like some ideas, some not so much, but the stars never align enough for me to get goosebumps... Until now!

For a film to truly excite it needs a story I want to see on celluloid, a script by a writer I truly admire, a cast I could watch in anything and a director choice that shows either a proven legacy or surprise in its thinking. This week I got all of that. Molly's Game about Molly Bloom, who failed to make the US Olympic team as a talented skier and so became the entrepreneur who, for eight years, ran the world's most illegal and yet lucrative poker game, has been touted around for a while. Fans of Aaron Sorkin have been waiting what seems like an age to see this story realised with his script and now we will get our chance... with Sorkin himself making his directorial debut! Not all writers make great directors but those that do bring their own words to life like no one else can. I am honestly so excited to see what Sorkin can do behind the camera and hope that, as with his writing, everything he does turns to gold. So there is the story and the directing choice part of my equation and I can feel my skin starting to chill slightly as those bumps make their way to the surface, now if only the casting can add something...

Jessica Chastain, she of The Martian and the incredible Zero Dark Thirty fame, is to take on the role of Molly Bloom and, if you'd have given me a million choices of star, I'd have plumped for Chastain every single time. This is an actress that caught me by surprise a few years ago when I sat and watched The Help and I've been watching her ever since. She has the intelligence required to work a Sorkin script, that is bound to be heavy dialogue, and there is something about Chastain that just makes, no, demands that I find the time to sit and watch a performance. It's not all about Molly though, the film will have high stakes poker players, political pawns and, of course, the federal government trying to bring Bloom to justice and to help the story along it now appears Idris Elba will star alongside Chastain.

See that huge mountain range over there? That be them goosebumps I mentioned.

Image - Getty Images