Jake Gyllenhaal and Joaquin Phoenix don’t look that much alike, but they do share a certain weird-eyed, haunted intensity which you could potentially confuse for a familial trait. Hence, presumably, their casting together in The Sisters Brothers, Jacques Audiard’s upcoming adaptation of Patrick DeWitt’s 2011 slacker Western.
Gyllenhaal and Phoenix will play Eli and Charlie Sisters, a pair of assassins plying their bloody trade in the Old West. Variety doesn’t make it clear who’ll be playing who, but logic and/or typecasting suggests that Gyllenhaal will play Eli, the gentle, oral hygiene-obsessed dreamer to Phoenix’s cold-hearted killer Charlie. The two will star opposite John C. Reilly, who’s also producing, and who was responsible for acquiring the rights to DeWitt’s book.