Steve Carell will star in Bennet Miller’s Foxcatcher as disturbed multimillionaire John du Pont. Du Pont, the great-great grandson of the founder of the chemical company, infamously killed Olympic wrestler David Schultz in 1996 and died in prison late last year. It’s not clear yet what parts of Du Pont’s life the movie will cover, but beyond the murder, there’s still plenty of unusual behavior: Du Pont founded the Delaware Museum of Natural History to house his collection of 2 million seashells; he was so into Villanova athletics that he donated enough money to have the arena named in his honor; and he built a sports-training facility on his property, known as Foxcatcher Farms. Miller proved with Capote that he knows his way around damaged interior lives, but Carell hasn’t done a strict drama before — even his more serious roles were in otherwise comedic movies like Little Miss Sunshine. Somehow, though, his comic characters are often so emotionally broken (think early era Michael Scott) that it’s not too hard to picture him going full-on dark or deranged. [Variety]
