Idris Elba will replace Jamie Foxx in the new film from Harmony Korine, revenge thriller The Trap, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The follow-up to Korine’s riotous cult indie crime romp Spring Breakers also has Al Pacino, Robert Pattinson and James Franco in final negotiations to join a cast that has already secured Benicio del Toro as one of the two leads. More details have also been revealed about the storyline for the film which, like Spring Breakers, is set in Miami – with the city’s music scene as a backdrop.
Elba will play Rico, a successful gangster rapper, with Del Toro as Slim, the childhood friend who took the fall for him 14 years earlier after a robbery the pair committed turned sour. When Slim is released from prison just as Rico is about to be honoured at the Grammy awards, he vows revenge on the man who married his girlfriend and raised his jailed friend’s son as his own.
Pattinson is set to play an Uzi-wielding surfer who joins the plot to take out Rico, with Franco as the rapper’s treacherous, cocaine-snorting manager. Pacino, who recently starred with Korine in a rare acting role for the latter in the David Gordon Green drama Manglehorn, is set to play Slim’s parole officer.
Discussing his new film with Bullett Media in September, Korine described The Trap as a “sprawling, very intense” revenge movie and his “most ambitious film to date”. Prior to Spring Breakers, the film-maker was best known for writing controversial 90s indie classic Kids for Larry Clark, before making a series of films about American outsiders, including Gummo and Trash Humpers.
The Trap appears likely to be touted to distributors at the upcoming Cannes film festival. Elba will next be seen on the big screen as all-seeing Norse god Heimdall in superhero epic The Avengers: Age of Ultron and takes the lead role in Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation, an African war drama being pitched as a contender for the 2015-2016 awards season.
