Brooklyn director John Crowley has begun building the cast he needs for the adaptation of Donna Tartt's bestseller The Goldfinch. Ansel Elgort nabbed the lead last week and now it's the turn of Dunkirk's Aneurin Barnard.
The Goldfinch follows a boy named Theodore Decker who loses his mother in a museum bombing, steals a painting (The Goldfinch, as painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654) in the confused aftermath and then spends his adulthood trying to unravel its mystery. Along the way he is briefly taken in by a wealthy Park Avenue family, moves to Las Vegas, befriends a colourful Ukrainian, binges on drugs, enters the antiques business with the partner of another of the bombing’s victims and chases the mystery of the painting and his family’s past to Amsterdam.
Elgort is playing Theo for at least one stage in his life. Barnard will be Boris, the aforementioned colourful Ukranian, the son of a Russian "businessman" who aids Theo in a wild adolescence of indolence in Las Vegas.
Warner Bros. has Amazon helping to fund the movie in exchange for streaming rights on Amazon Prime. The cameras should be rolling early next year.