WALKING DEAD’s Jon Bernthal Cast in Scorsese’s WOLF OF WALL STREET

• Tweet
• Pin It

PAN AM’s Margot Robbie Also In Talks

More casting news for Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming The Wolf of Wall Street: Former star of AMC’s The Walking Dead, Jon Bernthal, has signed on to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s drug dealer.  DiCaprio will be playing real-life Wall Street shark, Jordan Belfort, and Bernthal’s character will be supplying his narcotic as well as his money-laundering services, according to Deadline.  No word as to whether Bernthal will have some goofy accent and/or haircut, a la Gary Oldman in True Romance.

Also Deadline reports that Australian angelface Margot Robbie, known to American viewers (viewer?) as stewardess Laura Cameron on ABC’s Pan Am, which got the axe from the network in February after airing only 5 episodes.  Robbie is in talks to play the wife of Jordan Belfort, which seems to imply that she’d have a substantial role indeed.  While certainly so beautiful she could be an air-hostess in the ’60s, Robbie has yet to play a role in an American production that she can really cut her teeth on, and a Scorsese picture is definitely a jump in the deep end in that regard.  Here’s hoping she swims rather than sinks, but I’m optimistic since Scorsese has wrangled performances out of actors I used to not be able to stand, DiCaprio being the biggest.  In Robbie’s case, it’s a mere matter of not being familiar with her previous work, not that her previous work included Growing Pains.

Bernthal is also something of an unknown to me, since Walking Dead fever has pretty much passed me by.  I am looking forward to his next collaboration with Frank Darabont, TNT’s impending L.A. Noir, because as the title implies, it’ll be all noir and stuff.  I’ve heard from reliable sources (i.e. friends of mine) that few of the actors really tear it up on Walking Dead, that the main attraction remains the flesh-eating undead cannibals and their wacky hi-jinks.  So while neither of these pieces of casting news thrill me to the core, I remain faithful that Scorsese will deliver yet another crime film that has few peers in terms of quality and pure entertainment.