In what’s likely to be the manliest news to come out of International Women’s Day, Deadline is reporting that Hugh Jackman is in talks to star in the great Michael Mann’s long-in-the-works biographical drama about Enzo Ferrari, the Italian race car driver and founder of Ferrari. Mann began developed the film, simply called Ferrari, in the early 2000s, initially as a project for the late Sydney Pollack. Christian Bale signed on to play the hawk-nosed motoring icon once the production finally began to come together in 2015, but later dropped out.
The reported reason was health concerns about the amount of weight Bale would have to put on to play a middle-aged Ferrari; the English actor has already had to lose and gain a few hundred combined pounds of fat and muscle over the course of his career. Jackman (who, as Deadline notes, is roughly as tall as Ferrari) has spent the past 17 years getting increasingly more ripped just in case someone felt like making an X-Men movie, and is probably more than happy to get out of shape.
Ferrari is now looking to start filming next summer. Noomi Rapace is in talks to play Enzo Ferrari’s longtime mistress Lina Lardi in the film, which is set in the mid-1950s and focuses on Ferrari’s personal struggles (including, presumably, the death of his son in 1956), as well as his rivalry with Maserati.