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Bruce Willis in Talks for Lay the Favorite; Interviews Directors for Die Hard 5

Bruce Willis is in negotiations to star opposite Rebecca Hall in Stephen Frears’s Lay the Favorite, Take the Dog, an adaptation of Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling, Beth Raymer’s best-seller about her rise from lowly Vegas cocktail waitress to one of the top sports gambling bookmakers. We hear Willis would play the part of Dink Heimowitz, a cantankerous ex–New York bookmaker under whom Raymer apprenticed in the earlier part of the decade — that is, before she earned her MFA from Columbia University, was awarded a Fulbright, and, of course, wrote Lay the Favorite, which is set up at Focus Features.

Meanwhile, Vulture also hears that while 20th Century Fox was less than thrilled with the most recent draft of the script for a fifth Die Hard movie by Skip Woods (who wrote both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The A-Team for the studio) and is heading back to the drawing board, Willis is taking the initiative and interviewing directors to oversee its development. At the top of his list, we’re told, is Jorge Daniel Espinosa, the Swedish director who’s now making his English-language debut directing Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds in the CIA thriller Safe House at Universal.

Bruce Willis in Talks for Lay the Favorite; Interviews Directors for Die Hard 5