casting

Adam Driver to Play a Cuban Revolutionary From Ohio in Jeff Nichols’s Yankee Comandante

Large and in charge … of a Cuban people’s militia. Photo: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock/Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP/Shu

With more time to lift than ever before, we hope that Adam Driver will emerge from quarantine larger than ever. And when he does, Variety reports that he will reunite with Midnight Special director Jeff Nichols for Nichols’s next film, Yankee Comandante. The movie will be an adaptation of David Grann’s 2012 New Yorker article of the same name, the true story of Midwesterner William Alexander Morgan, who was one of only “two people who rose to the rank of comandante during the Cuban Revolution,” the other being Che Guevara. Nichols will write and direct, and shooting is “expected” to begin in 2021, although the coronavirus pandemic leaves production schedules uncertain.

To figure out whether or not Driver is a good casting choice to play the real-life Morgan, one only need read the New Yorker story, which describes the revolutionary as such:

Morgan was nearly six feet tall, and had the powerful arms and legs of someone who had survived in the wild. With a stark jaw, a pugnacious nose, and scruffy blond hair, he had the gallant look of an adventurer in a movie serial, of a throwback to an earlier age, and photographs of him had appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. The most alluring images — taken when he was fighting in the mountains, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara — showed Morgan, with an untamed beard, holding a Thompson submachine gun.

All he needs is a wig and a gun.

Adam Driver to Play a Cuban Revolutionary in New Film