A biopic about Billy Milligan, the man with 24 different, independent personalities? No problem, as long as Leonardo DiCaprio is going to play Milligan and eventually win his first ever Oscar (hopefully) for his role in this movie.
After taking a long break from acting and flying around the world for his environmental work, “The Great Gatsby” star goes back to the Hollywood scene with several movies in the pipeline, one of which includes New Regency’s upcoming movie named “The Crowded Room”.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Golden Globes winning actor is almost ready to play the role he’s eyed for nearly 20 years. He expressed his interest in playing Milligan since 1997 but the project went into the development hell after “Avatar” director James Cameron left the project. At that time, Cameron already co-wrote a screenplay with Todd Graff based on Daniel Keyes’ award-winning non-fiction novel “The Minds of Billy Milligan”.
Cameron’s screenplay mainly focuses on the realisation and the diagnosis of Milligan after being charged with robbery and raping 3 women on the Ohio State University campus. He was later diagnosed with extreme multiple personality disorder due to 24 distinctively different personalities that exist in his brain. There is Arthur, an extremely sophisticated and educated Englishman and there’s Ragen, a Yugoslavian communist who admitted to the robbery. His lesbian personality, Adalana was the one responsible for committing 3 rape cases in Ohio.
He passed away in December last year after he and his lawyers used the defense and agreed that his alternate personalities committed the crimes without his knowledge.
DiCaprio will serve as a producer alongside Jennifer Davisson and Alexandra Milchan while Jason Smilovic and Todd Katzberg are set to write the adapted script. Smilovic’s credits include “Lucky Number Slevin” and Todd Phillips’ upcoming “Arms and the Dudes”. There are a number of actors courted for the role of Milligan including Matthew McConaughey, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and John Cusack.
DiCaprio will be seen next in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant”, which is scheduled for a limited release on 25th December 2015 and a worldwide release on 8th January 2016.
(Source: THR, James Cameron Online)
