Bradley Cooper, Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara were recently set to star in Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, and we’ve learned tonight that Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse) has also joined the cast.
Variety reports that Dafoe “will play the head barker at a traveling carnival who gives Bradley Cooper’s character a job, ushering him into a world of show biz and grifting.”
Published in 1946, the novel spawned its first feature film just one year later starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, and this new take on the material for Fox Searchlight has been written by del Toro and Kim Morgan.
The original novel is described as “a study of the lowest depths of showbiz and its sleazy inhabitants – the dark, shadowy world of a second rate carnival filled with hustlers, scheming grifters, and Machiavellian femmes fatales.” The 1947 movie chronicles “The rise and fall of Stanton Carlisle, a mentalist whose lies and deceit prove to be his downfall.”