The 22-year-old actor joins a roll call of Hollywood A-listers including Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman who have led Grisham adaptations.
Transformers star Shia LaBeouf has signalled his accession to the Hollywood A-list by bagging the lead role in the upcoming John Grisham adaptation The Associate, according to Variety.
LaBeouf will play a Yale Law School graduate who is forced by nefarious figures from his past to take a job at a top legal firm to pass on top secret information about a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. It is based on the book of the same name which will be published in January – Grisham’s first legal thriller since 2005’s The Broker.
The 22-year-old actor will join a roll call of such Hollywood stalwarts as Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Matthew McConaughey, Tommy Lee Jones and Gene Hackman in taking the lead on a Grisham adaptation – there have been 11 films based on Grisham’s novels since 1993’s The Firm.
No director or other cast details are yet available, but the film will be released by Paramount, for whom LaBeouf worked on Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
LaBeouf proved himself more than capable of opening a film with the success of his recent outing Eagle Eye, in which he starred opposite Michelle Monaghan. While the rumours that he was set to take over from Harrison Ford as the headline act in the Indiana Jones series seem to have died down, he is very much the main man in the Transformers franchise, and will return in next year’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed once again by Michael Bay.
Source: Guardian
