Jamie Foxx won an Oscar in 2005 for portraying singer/songwriter Ray Charles in the Taylor Hackford-directed Ray and now he’s looking to take on another well-known personality as he enters the boxing ring to portray “Iron” Mike Tyson.
According to Variety, Foxx is attached to an untitled biopic on the controversial sports star that’s being put together and produced by Foxx’s manager Rick Yorn with Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Terence Winter (“The Sopranos,” The Wolf of Wall Street) writing the screenplay.
So far, the project doesn’t have a distributor although there should be a lot of interest in the project once all the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, mainly due to the popularity Tyson has achieved not only in his heyday as a boxer which took him to the very top of the sport, but also following a fall from grace that included six years of prison for rape, and subsequent charges of driving while drunk and drug possession after the death of his daughter and filing for bankruptcy.
In recent years, Tyson’s life has turned around with notable appearances in hit movies like The Hangover, a one-man show that played in Vegas and on Broadway as well as a bestselling memoir called “Undisputed Truth.”
It hasn’t been reported whether the memoir might be used as a basis for the film or how much of Tyson’s life will be covered in this biopic nor whether another actor might play the younger Tyson.
Previously, HBO tackled Tyson’s story with the 1995 film “Tyson” starring Michael Jai White and Tyson’s friend James Toback directed an award-winning documentary of the same name in 2008.
Foxx was recently seen as Electro in Sony Pictures’ The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but he has experience with sports movies having played Dwight Brown, Muhammad Ali’s corner man in Michael Mann’s Ali and quarterback Willie Beamen in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. He next stars as Daddy Warbucks in the Sony musical Annie.
Winter is coming off his Oscar nomination for adapting Jordan Belfort’s tell-all Wall Street book The Wolf of Wall Street into a hit film for Martin Scorsese.
(Photo Credit: Getty Images & Johnny Louis/WENN.com)
