The young marrieds from Young Victoria are back together in a director/star capacity with news from Deadline that Rupert Friend is tapping his old pal Emily Blunt for a role in Barton & Charlie & Checco & Bill.
The film, which marks Friend’s first directorial effort, would see Blunt playing a budding confidence trickster educated in the ways of the trade by Friend’s “down-on-his-luck con-artist” until she turns the game on her mentor, Grifters-style. From there they embark on a long road trip involving a ten year-old Mexican boy and a newspaper mogul. A far cry from Albert and Victoria, then.
As this interview shows, the pair have lots of chemistry on and off-screen. It’ll be good to see them in a Henry Fonda-and-Barbara Stanwyck adversarial/romantic dynamic in what sounds like a nicely old-fashioned storyline.
Friend oversaw a segment of portmanteau film Stars In Shorts in 2012, but Barton & Charlie & Checco & Bill is his first feature-length effort and it’ll get underway in the spring.
In an acting capacity, he has Hitman: Agent 47 upcoming, while Blunt will be seen in Denis Villeneuve's crime drama Sicario upcoming and that great Disney bake-off, Into The Woods, where she’s wife to James Corden’s dough guru, the Baker.