Daniel Radcliffe is not your little Harry Potter anymore. The actor is quickly shedding his boy-wizard skin, taking on a vast array of projects and scoring a hit with last year’s “The Woman In Black.” He has a diverse slate of projects on the way that includes indie Beat movie “Kill Your Darlings,” fantasy/horror thing “Horns,” and rom-com “The F Word.” Dude can apparently do it all, and now he’s going to face off against the Yakuza. No, really.
Radcliffe will star in an adaptation of “Tokyo Vice,” which has a script from J.T. Rogers, with music video helmer Anthony Mandler slated to direct. So, what’s it all about? Well, it’s a based-on-a-true-story tale about an American reporter working at Tokyo newspaper, whose coverage of crime stories finds him eventually in the sights of Yakuza crime boss Tadamasa Goto. Here’s the Amazon book synopsis:
Jake Adelstein is the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where for twelve years he covered the dark side of Japan: extortion, murder, human trafficking, fiscal corruption, and of course, the yakuza. But when his final scoop exposed a scandal that reverberated all the way from the neon soaked streets of Tokyo to the polished Halls of the FBI and resulted in a death threat for him and his family, Adelstein decided to step down. Then, he fought back. In Tokyo Vice he delivers an unprecedented look at Japanese culture and searing memoir about his rise from cub reporter to seasoned journalist with a price on his head.
So yeah, sounds potentially great, but we’ll see how the first-time filmmaker handles the material. Production begins in early 2014. [Deadline]