©Courtesy of Killers of the Flower Moon

Leonardo DiCaprio has been in talks to play Evel Knievel, a prominent stunt performers in history in a forthcoming movie.

Matthew Belloni reported in the latest Puck newsletter that Rick Yorn, DiCaprio’s manager, is ‘quietly negotiating’ with him to star in an upcoming Evel Knievel biopic directed by Damien Chazelle. It appears that the main focus would be on Knievel’s infamous Snake River jump, which involved Knievel attempting to jump across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle in 1974 and however, this movie would reportedly chronicle a failed stunt attempt by Knievel.

Martin Scorsese, who Yorn also represents, was initially attached to direct the project according to the Puck report. However, now Chazelle is the director, and Terence Winter wrote the script that Chazelle is revising. According to the report, the movie is expected to start production sometime this summer.

Knievel (originally Robert Craig Knievel) was a stunt performer and entertainer who was most famous for performing ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps across a wide range of objects, born in 1938. Eddie Knievel was a prominent figure in American culture during the 1970s. He appeared on multiple TV shows and toys were produced in mass quantities. Knievel passed away in 2007 at the age of 69 due to complications caused by a diabetes diagnosis.

DiCaprio would be given another highly acclaimed role in the movie, DiCaprio is set to co-star with Paul Thomas Anderson in “One Battle After Another“,  which is due out later this year, following his role in Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” in 2023. He has been rumored to appear in a Martin Scorsese movie with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.