Oscar Isaac to Star Alongside Viggo Mortensen in Thriller ‘The Two Faces of January’

Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini is looking to make his directorial debut with an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January and he has cast Drive co-star Oscar Isaac to appear alongside Viggo Mortensen.

The psychological thriller will center on a con artist, Chester MacFarland, who accidentally kills a Greek policeman who is investigating him. MacFarland’s wife, Collette, and an American student, Rydal Keener, become involved in covering up the death and fleeing the country.

Variety first got word of the casting news but there is no detail on who will play which character. I would venture that Mortensen will likely play MacFarland with Isaac possibly playing Keener. It will be interesting to see who is brought to play the wife but for now, this is an exciting piece of casting.

Highsmith was famously behind such novels as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The American Friend and Strangers on a Train so there is always potential for something good to come out of an adaptation of her work.

As for Isaac,  he has been keeping busy the past few months and he is set to appear next in The Bourne Legacy. He will also star in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, as well as the adaptation of Therese Raquin.

Production is set to begin by the end of the year. Read the book’s description below:

Three of them are waiting. Rydal Keener is waiting for something exciting to happen in his grubby little Athens hotel. At forty-odd, Chester MacFarland has been waiting much longer, expecting his life of stock manipu­lation and fraud to catch up with him. And Colette, Chester’s wife, is waiting for something altogether different. After a nasty little incident in the hotel, they all wait together. As the stakes—and the tension—in their three-cornered waiting game mount, they learn that while passports and silence can be bought, other things can cost as much as your life.

The Talented Mr. Ripley; The American Friend; Cry of the Owl; and a little one called Strangers on a Train