CULTURE

Chloë Grace Moretz Will Reportedly Play the Bonnie to Jack O’Connell’s Clyde

She's got some big shoes to fill.


Chloe Grace Moretz
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

More than half a century after Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty earned a pair of Oscar noms for portraying notorious criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, respectively, in Bonnie and Clyde, Chloë Grace Moretz and Jack O’Connell will reportedly reprise those roles in the upcoming film Love Is a Gun. According to Variety, the project, which will be helmed by Spanish director Kike Maíllo, is based on Jeff Guinn’s 2010 account, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, adapted for the screen by Up in the Air writer Sheldon Turner.

“We are excited to reintroduce the iconic story of Bonnie and Clyde,” the film’s producers said in a statement to Variety. “Their story remains ubiquitous in popular culture across the globe, yet few in this generation know the details of their intimate love affair and the circumstances that led to their notorious crime spree that captured the imagination of the world in their time. Kike, Chloë, and Jack are completely in sync about the character-driven approach we will be taking, and we feel lucky to have a creative team of this high caliber leading us forward.”

That “iconic story” revolves around the string of crimes Bonnie and Clyde committed in the early 1930s. Per the FBI, the dynamic duo were on the run from the law for several years, gathering arrest warrants as they went for robbery, kidnapping, and murder, before they were finally both killed in a shootout with police in May 1934 in Louisiana. Moretz actually has some experience playing a young woman who joins up with a man to pursue a life of crime: In 2017, she and Ansel Elgort costarred in November Criminals, in which they become tangled in a web of gun violence and drug deals after a friend is shot. O’Connell, too, is no stranger to the fugitive life, having portrayed a runaway outlaw in Netflix’s 2017 western series Godless.

Apparently, the 50-year mark is as good a time as any to bring the sordid tale of Bonnie and Clyde back to the big screen, since Love Is a Gun, which will reportedly begin production in early 2019, isn’t the only adaptation of the pair’s story to be released in the coming months. Back in February, according to Deadline, Netflix signed on to distribute The Highwaymen, a film about the two Texas Rangers, played by Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner, who eventually put a stop to Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree. Because it’s never too late to attack an 80-year-old story from every possible angle.

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